Understanding XBT
 

Hey all,



I'm just a hobbyist who has been developing my own torrent site front-end for the last few months for fun. I started with a public tracker to make it easier and I'm now upgrading to a private tracker, for now I've picked XBT.



I've got XBT working in private mode while connected to my project DB. However, I have two subjects I could use some advise on from you seasoned pros out there.



1) I would like to understand the use case/purpose of torrent_pass vs torrent_pass_version in the xbt_user table. The ref. I found says torrent_pass is deprecated yet the XBT version I got from github appears to require it and torrent_pass_version. The ref also states something about the pass changing on each download, yet when I examine private sites using XBT my pass appears the same on all my downloads, plz explain?


2) I'd like to get the cool little favicon working on my tracker URL. I found I github ref. on what code to add for XBT to serve a favicon and it works when I visit my tracker with a browser, yet when I add my tracker to my rTorrent powered seedbox it shows a blank square :wallbash:. Any ideas?



Thanks in advance for your time.

xbt doesn't really do anything with torrent_pass_version.

I use rtorrent but not rutorrent, so I can't verify favicon works or not. But, looking through the issues on xbt, it does not appear that it serves the favicon. https://github.com/OlafvdSpek/xbt/pull/47

Thanks for the reply, I've got a few more tracker questions
 

The link you posted seems accurate about bt-clients pulling the favicon from the root domain, my tracker XBT tracker is currently only running in my lab using a dynamic dns service so that makes since its not working.



What got me started on the subject of XBT serving the favicon was when I stumbled on this github commit to connection.cpp file. I've added it to my XBT before running make on the project but I don't code in C, so it's hard for me to make out what this is doing.

https://github.com/OlafvdSpek/xbt/pull/47/files


From what I can tell XBT appears really solid and performant, I know opinions are like assholes but what's your favorite private tracker? Is there a standalone package of the Pu239 tracker or would I have to export it myself?

I've already got XBT working about 75% with my front end but since it doesn't support HTTPS natively, I keep second guessing my choice.



Thoughts?



Thanks again.

Pu-239 is no longer being developed. But, you're free to do with it whatever you like.

XBT is good. I have not tested others, there are quite a few. I can say that xbt can handle 180k peers much better than php announce on the same hardware.

For https and XBT, you can use nginx to connect and then forward to XBT, I think they call it reverse proxy. It keeps the communication, site and your users more secure than allowing open http connections.

xbt can work either with regular torrent passes or using the torrent pass version approach. It uses a key that is added to the xbt_config table the first time the server runs along with user id and info hash. The torrent_pass_version column is just an int that can be incremented if you want to reset all of a user's passes at once.

An example on svn: https://github.com/OlafvdSpek/xbt/bl...ss_version.php

Using torrent pass version there is less impact if an announce URL gets leaked as they are per torrent. Potentially it would also use less memory on the tracker side, but this is unlikely to be a concern for most.