opentracker Information & opentracker Links at HealthHaven.com

opentracker
Developer(s)	Dirk Engling (“erdgeist”)
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like (Linux, BSD, ...)
Size	~40 KiB
Type	BitTorrent tracker
License	Beerware
Website	erdgeist.org/arts/software/opentracker

For the open source versions of BeOS' desktop management tools, see OpenTracker.

opentracker is a free (licensed as beerware) BitTorrent peer tracker software (a special kind of HTTP or UDP server software) that is designed to be fast and to have a low consumption of system resources.

[edit] Features

OpenTracker runs several times faster than older tracker implementations and requires less memory. (For example, it runs fine with the limited resources of many embedded systems.) Several instances of the software may be run in a cluster, with all of them synchronizing with each other. Besides the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) opentracker may also be connected to via User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which creates less than half of the tracker traffic HTTP creates.^[1] It supports IPv6, gzip compression of full scrapes, and blacklists of torrents. Because there have already been cases of people being accused of copyright violation by the fact that their IP address was listed on a BitTorrent tracker,^[2] opentracker may mix in random IP address numbers for the purpose of plausible deniability.

[edit] Technology

It runs completely in RAM, accounting for much of its speed advantage over other tracker software. It is written in C and based on the library libowfat that manages network connections. For some new functionality like the UDP support with IPv6^[3] or the syncing of several instances of BitTorrent tracker software, new extensions to the BitTorrent protocol were made.

[edit] Usage

Among many others the creators themselves run the worlds second largest BitTorrent tracker on denis.stalker.h3q.com with the software and the worlds largest tracker at The Pirate Bay switched from their selfmade software Hypercube to opentracker in the end of 2007.^[4] This makes it likely that the majority of BitTorrent peers worldwide are served with opentracker.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation uses it^[5] to distribute their own TV shows.

[edit] See also

Comparison of BitTorrent tracker software

[edit] External links

[edit] References

[0] ttp://xbtt.sourceforge.net/udp_tracker_protocol.html

[1] ttp://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2007/02/big-media-dmca-notices-guilty-until.html

[2] ttp://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/?p=38

[3] ttp://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-switches-to-opentracker-071208/

[4] ttp://nrkbeta.no/norwegian-broadcasting-corporation-sets-up-its-own-bittorrent-tracker/

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