MRTG Monitoring
By taklamakan | November 28, 2007
We put our MRTG monitoring of some of the trackers running Opentracker online. You can find them here. The stats include the ThePirateBay trackers running Opentracker (the tpb stuff), our own tracker (h3q131) and a tracker running at wikipedia used for the distribution of the Wikipedia DVD (wkp154). Updates are done every hour.
You can see that our own tracker (currently not working at all) struggles with a rate-limit by the ISP and that ThePirateBay trackers had a connection problem at midnight (CET).
Update: Turns out, its not a rate-limit but just a broken switch-port. We are up and running again! Lets hope it stays that way.
Topics: tech | 3 Comments »
ThePirateBay is testing opentracker!
By taklamakan | November 22, 2007
The famous Swedish Bittorrent-Site is currently working with us on testing our opentracker software for ThePirateBay!
We are in the stage of tuning and feature adding. Our software is already running on four of the piratebay-trackers (vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org, tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org, tv.tracker.thepiratebay.org, a.tracker.thepiratebay.org) distributed with round-robin DNS over seven servers. Together they are handling nearly 17.000 hits/sec, serve 700 thousand torrents and have about 5 million peers.
ThePirateBay plans to switch the last trackers running hypercube to our opentracker software as soon as we have all features implemented. This should be real soon now.
Topics: coding, history, tech | 3 Comments »
new hardware is in service
By supergrobi | October 21, 2007
we had a rough ride the last days. the new hardware had not enough power to serve all requests (sometimes more than 3000 conn/sec). thats a quarter billion requests per day!
so we (ok, I!) decided to buy a new server with an intel NIC we know can handle the packetstorm. I made the error to only buy one with only 1GB ram, but we will put another gig in soon.
in the meantime we are optimizing like hell to save mem and make the tracker software even faster and also more relaxed in answering wrong requests like ‘announc?…’, ‘anounce?…’, “scrape++++?…’ and announce ?…’.
for the record our correct announce url is:
http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
Topics: tech | 1 Comment »
Server problems
By taklamakan | October 1, 2007
We have some serious problems with our server, the system kept crashing on us and as the server hosts some other services beside the tracker as well, we decided to shutdown the tracker partially to prevent those other services from suffering anymore until we get our own server. While the UDP part (udp://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969) is still up and running, TCP connections (http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969) are blocked for now as they are the stuff that make most of the load.
We already have new hardware, kindly donated by someone (thanks!), with a fresh system in our hands and we hope we can move our tracker to the new server and bring the tracker fully back online on Tuesday or Thursday.
Topics: tech | 1 Comment »
The 5 Most Popular BitTorrent Trackers
By taklamakan | September 25, 2007
How nice, we got ranked third in The 5 Most Popular BitTorrent Trackers ranking on torrentfreak.com! (yes we know, some peers and torrents are from peer-inflation)
There is a nice interview with the guys from SUMOtracker too! Kudos to all the tracker admins out there, keep up your good work! Oh and thanks to torrentfreak for this nice posting!
Topics: free speech | 1 Comment »
News from PeerGuardian and Bluetack
By taklamakan | September 24, 2007
Fakhir (Phoenixlabs staff member) pointed out that:
PhoenixLabs (PeerGuardian publishers) don’t publish or have any control over what is or is not included in the IP lists.
So its not PeerGuardians fault, they just use the blacklist of bluetack. So bluetack compiles the blocklist and everyone else just trusts them blindly, thanks for pointing that out!
He also said we should contact bluetack about the block of our tracker IP-Addr., so we did! We sat down in an IRC chat on #bluetack together with Monk from bluetack (the only person in charge for the blacklist we found) and Andreas Bogk from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) to discuss why the IP-Addr. of our tracker and all the networks of the CCC are blocked by them.
Their “facts” are:
The funniest thing was that they really believe that the owner and admin of the server our opentracker runs on, works for the MPAA because of the “You can click, but you have to hide!”-pun at his website linking to the MPAA website, which is obviously a pun joke on the You can click, but you can’t hide print and billboard campaign of MPA, MPAA and GVU!
I know this guy since like forever, first he couldn’t stop laughing when we told him that. In fact he now wants a T-shirt with the MPAA joke for the next CCC congress , but on the other hand he feels a bit stabbed in the back by those allegations from bluetack.
And those allegations are more than ridiculous! He is not working for MediaDefender, the MPAA or any other p2p or anti-p2p related company!
So we are a secret undercover anti-piracy operation funded by MediaDefense and MPAA! Whats next, maybe we are terrorists funded by Al Quaida?
The people too dumb to register their fake download-website miivi.com with a WHOIS record not related to MediaDefender, the people so dumb that one of them forwarded his email to a gmail-account protected by a “password” so easy that a three-year old child could bruteforce it by its first ever spoken word, those very same people are now suddenly capable of running a blog like this as a ploy, programm a high-scalable open-source bittorrent tracker, let a guy well respected in the hacker and software scene host it via his CVS, let another guy well respected in the software and hacker scene link on it more than once and then not even brag with one word about that in their leaked mail? Wow.
denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969 is of course not operated by MediaDefender or any other anti-p2p organisation, <paranoia>but maybe the leaked stuff is all a big decoy to cover all this up!!1!</paranoia>
So someone from an IP-Addr. range temporary (they do the Chaos Communication Congress every year) or permanent (they have branch offices in most of the larger towns in Germany) registered to the Chaos Computer Club downloads the bluetack blocklist more than its acceptable, we are sorry.
So over a year ago our tracker (before using the new opentracker software, before moving to the server we currently are running it on and before opening this blog) did run on a host at the Berlin CCC club with an IP-Addr. registered to the Chaos Computer Club because we were short of other hosting options.
So what? We think we already made clear that denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969 is not operated by the Chaos Computer Club but some of us have connections to the CCC.
Yes there were and probably are! Its an open bittorrent tracker, so yes anyone can announce anything on it (we do filter some selected networks which do strange things on our tracker, they are selected by hand because we don’t trust in blocklists like the one in question from bluetack). If there are fake torrents on our tracker we are sorry. We recommend to not use the fake torrents, read the comments before downloading a torrent from index sites! Throw the fake away if you downloaded one, comment the fake torrent on the index-sites and give something back to the community!
We continue to do our thing for the community: We run a fscking fast (even MediaDefender came to that conclusion) open bittorrent tracker for everybody and we think this is as un-anti-p2p as it can get!
Conclusion: Those “facts” are worth nothing. Every single one of them is rubbish.
To quote Fakhir again: Phoenixlabs uses the bluetack lists because their judgment and experience as far as IP research.. The way we see it, this judgement and experience in IP research is blinded by paranoia and self-content.
For us it seems to be impossible to get our entry deleted from the blacklist by talking to those guys.
We personally can not recommend the use of any filtering software that includes their blacklist without any form of quality assurance or review.
Topics: free speech, history | 19 Comments »
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