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[Krstfr]

I had to re-download the 2007 "120000 modules" torrent again (I had lost it in a flash drive failure), but this time it is going slow. In BitTorrent and µTorrent, the Tracker tab has the regular 3 and Modarchive's: http://tracker.modarchive.org:2710/announce. The status for it is Invalid Key. Is there something I did wrong?

[jantore]

Hi, Krstfr.

I'm looking at the requests from your clients on the tracker, and I can see the reason why they are failing. In order to authenticate themselves (in case their IP address changes, for instance), the clients will generate a secret key at the beginning of a session. This key is passed along with every subsequent request to the tracker. The tracker will only accept the request if the key matches the initial one.

In your case, and for some reason unknown to me, the key changes for every single request. This seems to happen in both BitTorrent and µTorrent. Very strange.

I'm reluctant to making any changes to the tracker code to permit requests where, for instance, the secret key has changed but the IP address has not. Is there perhaps a third BitTorrent client implementation you could try before we start looking at workarounds?

Also, what speeds are you getting? Your initial request should work, and you should get a list of peers in return on that one. Seeing as the peers on our torrents are pretty stable, I would imagine you'd continue to get decent performance even if your later requests are denied.

[Krstfr]

Speeds are 1KB to 1.3 MB per second. It should be done in about 5-6 hours. How would I go about continuing the download in a third client? I've already downloaded 10 GB.

[jantore]

Speeds are 1KB to 1.3 MB per second. It should be done in about 5-6 hours.

That doesn't sound too bad at all. Variations in speed is normal and expected. Even less reason for me to throw hacks around in the code. :-)

How would I go about continuing the download in a third client? I've already downloaded 10 GB.

There's no reliable way of doing this, really. I'd rather just start a new download to a new location, let it run for an hour or so and see if it produces the same response from the tracker. If possible you can download just a subset of the files (to save disk space) and limit the download speed (to make sure the download doesn't finish before several requests have been made). Your current download can continue running.

[Krstfr]

I'd rather just start a new download to a new location, let it run for an hour or so and see if it produces the same response from the tracker. If possible you can download just a subset of the files (to save disk space) and limit the download speed (to make sure the download doesn't finish before several requests have been made).

I'll try this.

[Krstfr]

With Vuze I didn't see any Invalid Key errors.

[jantore]

With Vuze I didn't see any Invalid Key errors.

Thanks for testing that. Useful to know.

I've done some log analysis, and it looks like this is an issue that primarily affects recent versions of the µTorrent and BitTorrent clients (I believe the BitTorrent client is now based on the same code as µTorrent).

I'm not making any changes to the tracker until I've figured what they've done and why. Either using a different client (there should be plenty of alternatives) or an older version of µTorrent (with possible security implications...) should solve the problem for now.

If anyone has any idea what the deal is with µTorrent, input is welcome.

[Krstfr]

I'll be using Vuze for now on, seems pretty sweet.