World’s Largest BitTorrent Trackers Suffer Prolonged Downtime

[Ernesto]

OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent are two non-commercial BitTorrent trackers running on the beerware-licensed Opentracker software. Neither service hosts or links to torrent files and both are free to use by all torrent users.

The services, which were listed as number one and two in our latest list of most-used trackers, coordinate the downloads of 30 million people at any given point in time.

This means that the trackers handle a staggering three billion connections per day – each.

However, starting a few days ago the trackers stopped working entirely. While the trackers have had their fair share of downtime in the past, it’s not often that both of the top trackers are offline for more than a day. Needless to say, this caused concern among some of the most avid file-sharers.

PBT and OBT down

To find out more TF contacted the owner of OpenBitTorrent, who told us that the current downtime is intentional. The tracker is replacing some hardware, a process that could take a week or more to complete. In any event, there is no doubt that the tracker will continue business as usual in the near future.

We also reached out to PublicBitTorrent, whose owner confirmed they are also working on maintenance issues. There is currently no ETA for when the tracker will return, but the current downtime will continue for several days at least.

The upside to all the bad news is that most people can still download torrents. In fact, the majority of BitTorrent users probably failed to notice the downtime to begin with.

Instead of using a tracker, most downloads work fine when they rely solely on DHT and PEX, which allows downloaders to get info on other peers from each other, instead of a central tracker. This works just fine in most situations, especially for popular files.

The downtime is most problematic for users of BitTorrent proxy services. These often advise users to disable DHT and PEX to prevent their real IP-addresses from leaking out, so unless a torrent has other working trackers, nothing can be downloaded for the time being.

For users of proxy services there is no other option than to wait until the trackers return. Meanwhile, udp://tracker.istole.it:80/announce is the largest BitTorrent tracker that’s still online.



source

[JimboDGAF]

I wonder if its a routine maintenance, or if it's something serious.
but thanks for sharing mate.

[KadrianBlackwolf]

I noticed this some time ago and was wondering what had happened. Thank you for the update. For anyone needing trackers, this is my current list of working trackers. Some are up and down, but most of them appear to work most of the time.

Note that when you are making a torrent file with uTorrent you will get a warning about an invalid tracker. Remove the Demonii tracker from the list and uTorrent will create your torrent with no problems. I haven't tried this on other torrent clients.

http://tracker.ex.ua:80/announce

udp://open.demonii.com:1337

udp://tracker.istole.it:80/announce

udp://tracker.ex.ua:80/announce

http://bt.careland.com.cn:6969/announce

http://tracker.blazing.de/announce

http://exodus.desync.com:6969/announce

http://exodus.desync.com/announce

http://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969/announce

udp://ipv4.tracker.harry.lu:80/announce

udp://12.rarbg.me:80/announce

udp://coppersurfer.tk:6969/announce

[NIK]

Or, better yet, don't.

The key point in the OP's story is this:

The upside to all the bad news is that most people can still download torrents. In fact, the majority of BitTorrent users probably failed to notice the downtime to begin with.

Trackers are obsolete: they are not necessary, they bring more disadvantages than advantages and holding on them perpetuates the problems and holds back the adoption by torrent sites of DHT swarm reporting (because although it is more accurate it is more work for them)

When you are making a torrent file, leave all trackers out entirely. Only ever include a tracker if the upload process of the site you want to upload to forces you to. [And, frankly, if the site forces you to include a tracker you ought to consider NOT uploading there.]

[KadrianBlackwolf]

Actually, I noticed the trackers had gone down when the status bar of a couple of my torrent uploads turned red in uTorrent. Checking the tracker list, I saw that none of the trackers were working, although I do have DHT, Local Peer Discovery, and Peer Exchange enabled. I added a couple of working trackers from other torrent uploads and the stalled torrents started uploading again.

I tried removing all of the trackers from one of my torrents a moment ago and it's still uploading with no issue. That said, I don't know what could have caused the earlier problem. If trackers aren't necessary for TPB, that's great. That's just one less headache I have to deal with when making a torrent.

[kjf]

Give it a try. I leave the tracker list empty when making torrents and never had a problem seeding.

[NIK]

Your torrent client communicates with three distinct parties:

• a few pre-defined trackers, which may or may not still exist, and be online, and not be overloaded, and not have been blocked by your Government/ISP, and not be under attack, from whom it obtains lists of IP addresses
  
• hundreds of dynamically chosen peers active on the DHT network, from whom it obtains lists of IP addresses
  
• hundreds of dynamically chosen peers active on the bittorrent network, with whom it exchanges pieces of the files within torrents and from whom it obtains lists of IP addresses

You've said that you noticed the trackers had gone down when the status bar of a couple of torrents turned red. ie. but for that pointless cosmetic change you wouldn't have noticed the trackers being down because your torrent client would still have been sharing both ip addresses and file pieces. That's one of the problems with trackers (or, strictly, it's laziness on the part of the torrent client developers, who haven't removed the now-unnecessary alarms from their clients)--they alarm people when they go down when really nobody need give a fuck.

Adding trackers to your torrents didn't achieve anything other than stopping uTorrent displaying the pointless red color. It couldn't have achieved anything unless, purely by coincidence, other people downloading the exact same torrent as you independently added the exact same trackers as you. That could happen, but it would be very uncommon. ie. not something that you could rely upon, and no substitute for the wholesale ditching of an obsolete technology in favour of a more reliable one.

[KadrianBlackwolf]

Okay, I get what you're saying. The red indicator means that all of the trackers I added when making the torrent aren't working, but unless the torrent is for a private site that requires the use of a private tracker, it doesn't matter. DHT will do all of the necessary tracking for public sites like TPB, Kickass, YIFY, etc. There are some popular private sites out there so for that reason I don't think trackers will become outdated anytime soon, but it would be nice if torrent clients wouldn't bugger about trackers when it isn't necessary.

[NIK]

The red indicator actually means a variety of different things: from "ALL trackers in a torrent are unresponsive (even when DHT and PEX are doing fine)" to "you've run out of disc space and nothing can be written" to "you don't haver access permission to write to the file/folder you're trying to save to" and a few others.

And, yes, I was talking about public trackers. Private trackers, by definition, have to use trackers and there is no technology available or looming ahead that will change that. So trackers will vanish from the public sphere but they will continue to serve that niche market.

And, yes, DHT and PEX will do fine for all the public sites you mention. I've been torrenting-sans-trackers for more than a year and I'm one of the ones mentioned in the article who never even noticed there was a problem. I just habitually delete the trackers from any torrent I'm seeding/downloading. [Or, rather, I did that when I used uTorrent. Now I use Tixati which allows you to blacklist trackers, and I just add entries to the blacklist every time I come across a new one, so it blocks announces to them automatically.]

[asterastrip]

I want to through in the uploader in the equation.

These are the trackers you get when you grab the magnet from TPB regardless how many you have used when creating the torrent.

Code:

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80
udp://tracker.istole.it:6969
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80
udp://open.demonii.com:1337

I delete tracker.ccc because it's down for years, don't even know why TPB still uses/inserts this one.

Now go back 4-5 days, all the other trackers were working like a swiss watch and i hope the downtime issue will be sorted in the following weeks.

I don't know which one, but TPB uses one of those to get the stats.
If 20 people seed the same torrent and they all have delete the trackers, then the torrent will appear dead in the index.
It won't be dead but really the majority of downloaders won't even try a torrent with 0 seeds.

Here's my suggestion, and this is from an uploader view not a downloader.

Maybe one day the sites can get stats from DHT or the clients or wherever else and we won't need trackers for stats any longer.
Maybe one day the sites will decide to automatically remove all trackers, remove the seed/leech column and let the user grab anything that suits him best and get the stats from the client.

Until that day comes, keep the trackers in your client, maybe seed a bit if you can.
No uploader wants to see his torrents indexed as dead, you'd be doing him a favor.

My 2¢