This is part 03 in my Seedbox From Scratch series. In this series I start at the most basic level, assuming no server or Linux skills. First we built the easiest and most basic seedbox possible, and now we will continue by adding some of the more basic features.

Once you have your seedbox happily seeding torrents from your favorite private trackers, you’ll likely want to know how to get those files off your seedbox and back home. With most private trackers, you do not want to use BitTorrent from your home as well as your seedbox because it will hurt your ratio to download it (leech it) from the torrent cloud twice. Instead, you want your seedbox to do all the seeding, and get the files to your local computer in some other way.

Today we learn what just might be the simplest way to do that, and we won’t need FTP.

This is part 02 in my Seedbox From Scratch series. In this series I start at the most basic level, assuming no server or Linux skills. We will first build the easiest and most basic seedbox possible, and then work our way up to some pretty advanced topics.

Zero to seeding

Today we go from a brand new server with a freshly installed operating system, to seeding torrents and building your ratio, in less than 5 minutes - even if you have no prior knowledge about any of this.

To the novice, this can seem like an overwelming task. That’s why there are plenty of seedbox hosting companies willing to do it for you. But if you are willing to step out of your comfort zone for 5 minutes, I’ll show you how to bypass the middleman. (No disrespect to these companies, there are some really good seedbox hosting companies that add a lot of value. Most of them provide services beyond what you will get from me in these next five minutes.)

My name is Kat. I’m one of Sharky’s friends who decided to give new life to this website.

By way of introduction, I’ll be doing a series of tutorials on seedboxes. Starting with the easiest and most basic seedbox possible, and working our way up to some pretty advanced topics.

In this series, I’ll describe how any novice can become the ninja-admin of their own BitTorrent server. Notice I said “can”, not “will”. Developing any skill takes time and dedication; that said, getting started is a lot less scary than many assume. The first seedbox we build will be simple, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be powerful.

Over the span of four years, Sharky wrote 620 articles and 59 tutorials. When Sharky handed over FileShareFreak.com to us, it was just a domain name. Sharky had simply let the hosting run out and it was eventually deleted. No Wordpress, no database, no website. We were given nothing but the domain name.

As planned, we initiated the transfer from his registrar to ours (one that has publicly condemned SOPA of course), and began thinking about what to do with it.

Sharky alerted us to a clone of the site that some unknown person had set up. Maybe we could get some of the content back from there.

It turns out we were able to copy the whole website via a little program called HTTrack. But this gave us just static HTML files. Each one embedded with the old advertising and broken links.

To get the content out of those files we used Nokogiri and wrote some Ruby scripts to parse the HTML and pull out just the sections we needed. This took a few days to get right, but eventually we were able to pull the content into Markdown files that we could use in blogging software called Octopress. (I highly recommend it, its been great so far.)

As soon as we got the site up, we were a bit suprised by it’s popularity. It’s no TorrentFreak, but its doing rather well for a dead website. Since going live last week, it has has been getting around 5000 unique visitors per day. I think it’s cool that most of the readers on FSF are smart enough to have graduated to a real web browser with Chrome being the most popular. These are browser stats from yesterday:

FileShareFreak.com - This is a site many of us have loved in the past for the depth of its rich information and consistent timely updates. It’s been dormant now for a year and a half, collecting digital dust on its virtual shelf. The last post made here attracted huge numbers of trolls and spam, like food left in the park after a picnic.

So let’s dispel with the rumors first. Sharky is not dead. He was sick for a few months and stopped writing because of it. The circumstances of the situation? He was having back surgery to remove a very large pilonidal cyst. Approximately 5 inches by 1.5 by 1.5 inches of cyst material was removed. The crater that resulted from the surgery was left completely open to heal from the inside out. Sound nasty? It was.

With Winter just around the corner, BitTorrent fans usually expect to witness a spike in activity regarding new tracker development - and this November Edition is no exception. Lots of new trackers to report about; including 2 amazing new scene trackers; 2 new HD/Blu-ray trackers to hit the scene; and even some niche sites worthy of mention.

After more than a full year of intense planning and continuous development, TorrentLeech v3 is finally ready to be unleashed. Get excited - this isn’t just some quick paint job thrown over an old engine; TL has been entirely gutted & reinvented into something to behold. Not since What.CD’s iconic Gazelle has any tracker undergone such favourable modifications to improve user functionality. Developed 100% from scratch, the new TL offers an impressive array of improvements over their previous aging sourcecode.

What if the BitTorrent community got together and pooled their information to catch invite traders, sellers and ratio cheaters? The concept itself isn’t a new one; in fact a system already exists between private trackers. It’s known that What.CD offers resources to tracker sysops & admins to catch & remove bad torrenters, available to those of the “Torrent Celebrity” userclass. That’s great for trackers, but bad BT behavior often begins well in advance of finding tracker invites. Unfortunately most Torrent Forum staffers are unable to access those tracker-to-tracker blacklists. Yet, as often is the case, bad members on torrent forums are the same as those found on trackers themselves - and are banned for exactly the same reasons. Is there a similar system set up that caters exclusively to torrent forum staff to share internal info amongst each other? Not until now.

This is Part II of the Most Popular Private Tracker Invite Requests of 2010. From the first 25, there are only 3 trackers that were not listed at least somewhere within the top 50. From the these last 25, almost half are brand-new entries for 2010. Since we publish this “Top 50” series quite late in the year, it gives newer trackers a fair chance to be listed. That is, if they aren’t open for registration most of the time. Having said that, here are a few interesting statistics from the entire 50:

Due to popular request, it’s that time of the year again when FSF takes a peek into the year’s most requested private tracker invitations. We uncovered some surprising statistics - FtN is no longer on top, plus we have 15 new entries to this 2010 edition (3 in Part One; 12 in Part Two).

FSF made a *best effort

• here to provide data as accurate as humanly possible, with no bias towards one forum or another. We simply counted requests (and filled ones) as best as we could do. Forums included in the statistics are listed below.