Bittorrent is a great distribution method for large files, but its heavy bandwidth usage can be disruptive to both work and home networks. [Brett O’Connor] has decided to push all of his torrenting activity into the cloud. Amazon’s EC2 service lets you run any number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI, virtual machines) on top of their hardware. You pay for processing time and data transferred. [Brett] put together a guide for building your own seedbox on the service. First, you set up the Security Group, the firewall for the machine. Next, you specify what AMI you want to use. In this example, it’s a community build of Ubuntu. Once you have your SSH keypair, you can start the instance and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. TorrentFlux is the web frontend for bittorrent in this case. It manages all the torrents and you just need to click download when you want to grab the completed file.
Even if you don’t plan on setting up a seedbox, the post is a straightforward example of how-to get started with EC2. He’s not sure what the cost will be; the current estimate is ~$30/mo.
[via Waxy]
[photo: nrkbeta]
Why go to all this trouble when Amazon S3 (their storage service) already supports torrents? All you have to do is add ‘?torrent’ to the URL.
The costs of running an S3 node 24×7 for a month *start* at $75/mo, not including network traffic or S3 storage, so he must be firing up the node only when he uses it and shutting it down after, and not using it that much. I guess its competitive with commercial seedbox services, but EC2 is *not* cheap.
On the danger of being accused of spamming, I would like to point to furk.net a filehoster with build in torrent support, I think it costs around 10€/month for 60GB of download traffic (torrent trafic is free).
Apparently they are located in the Netherlands, so DMCA shouldnt be an issue.
I personally think that ec2 is great, but i tend to use it for more “challenging” tasks than torrents.
Brilliant! So now there is a hard, established monetary connection between your seeding activities and yourself, if anyone ever takes exception to you stealing movies/music/etc.
i kinda like the idea, but like anon said .
the link …
There are so many cheaper alternatives to this.
EC2 does look interesting tho I must say
Wow this is what i got from AMAZON!!!!!
Original report:
* Destination IPs:
* Destination Ports:
* Destination URLs:
* Start Time: 2009-08-16 XXXX
* End Time: 2009-08-16 XXXX
* NTP: No
* Log Extract:
<<<
–
–
XXXXXX
Open
Normal
–
Warner Bros. Verified Notice Program
MediaSentryCopyrightInfringement
copyright2@mediasentry.com
–
Amazon.com, Inc.
Adrian Garver
Legal Department 1200 12th Avenue South, Suite 1200 Seattle, WA 98144-2734 US
(206) 266-4064
–
2009-08-16T
XXXXXXXX
BitTorrent
1
–
–
The Hangover
5F29F7CC78F92EC907E8F2D2021ACDE462B20401
>>>
INFRINGEMENT DETAIL
——————–
Infringing Work: The Hangover
First Found: 16 Aug 2009 XXXX EDT (GMT -0400) Last Found: 16 Aug 2009 XXXX EDT (GMT -0400) IP Address: XXXXXX IP Port: 10985
Protocol: BitTorrent
Torrent InfoHash: 5F29F7CC78F92EC907E8F2D2021ACDE462B20401
Containing file(s):
The Hangover (2009) DVDSCR-MAXSPEED.torrent (764,463,219 bytes)
This is old, but the reason why ppl still get notices it’s because they are not using magnet links. DO NOT DL .TORRENT FILES without a proxy!! Use only magnet links!!
(This response is for educational purposes only.)