Public trackers/torrents blocked?

[Megalith 1]

Is anyone having trouble lately with torrents on public trackers? They work fine when I disable AirVPN, but they do not connect at all with the VPN active and get the "connection timed out" error in my client (uTorrent). Torrents on private trackers work completely fine, and so does Slackware (http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php).

 

I have tested every Virginia-based VPN along with the Hong Kong one, and public torrents do not work on any of them.

[go558a83nk 352]

this gets asked a lot.  you should try searching the forums.

 

just enable DHT and peer exchange and rock on.

[S.O.A. 82]

You aren't the only one having this problem. I have DHT and Peer Exchange enabled and public trackers still don't work on most U.S. servers.  

[go558a83nk 352]

the point is, with DHT and peer exchange, you DON'T NEED public trackers. 

[OpenSourcerer 1359]

Think of BitTorrent as a street with many inhabitants - the swarm. There's some kind of agency who maintains a list of all the inhabitants with their addresses - the tracker. A tracker maintains a list of all clients active in a swarm. A new inhabitant will ask the agency for the list of all inhabitants in this street so he can begin sending and retrieving things. So a new client will ask the tracker for this list and then connects to as many clients as possible to begin seeding and downloading. If there's no agency, no one will know the address of the inhabitants in the street. If there's no tracker - there won't be any activity.

 

With DHT, every client will be a node having "supervision" of a set of keys from the keyspace which is nothing more than possession of files. If an inhabitant wants to find a certain key - a certain file - it asks his neighbors if they know someone with that key (or file).

The neighbor is either the one in possession of that key and will call himself a peer or he will ask his neighbors the same question, and that neighbor will ask his own neighbors, too, and so on until someone in possession of that key is found who can show himself as a peer for the requested file.

In addition, found peers can provide all peers known to them as a peer list (Peer EXchange), assuming the role of a tracker. The key is the hash value of a file, hence the name Distributed Hash Table.

 

That's why you don't need any of the public trackers to actually complete a download or start seeding into the unknown.

 

Public trackers are known to block anonymizer services, by the way.