Re: [MLUG] apache2 mod bittorrent

[Daniel Baber <danielb AT libentech.com>]

Gary Kramlich wrote:
> Daniel Baber wrote:
>   
> > Gary Kramlich wrote:
> >     
> > > Anyone ever set up mod-bt for apache2?  It appears to be working, but I
> > > can't find any documentation on how to actually use this thing.
> > >
> > >   
> > >       
> > Google is your friend: http://www.crackerjack.net/mod_bt/mod_bt.html
> >     
>
> Wow I never would have thought of that before asking here </sarcasm>.
> You'll see from that documentation that there is nothing about how to
> actually upload a torrent, which is what i was after.  Maybe I should
> have been more specific.
>   
Well I have just spend a few minutes reading over the documentation 
(specifically these URLs -
http://www.crackerjack.net/mod_bt/mod_bt.html, 
http://www.crackerjack.net/mod_bt/configuration.html,
http://www.crackerjack.net/mod_bt/httpd.conf.txt,
http://www.crackerjack.net/mod_bt/Apache_ModBT.html, and 
http://www.crackerjack.net/mod_bt/Net_BitTorrent_LibBT_Tracker.html) and 
I believe there is enough information there to understand how to use the 
module. It basically provides a tracker "web service" backend and a 
mod_perl/PHP API (although the PHP API looks limited).

You would still need to write a frontend, using mod_perl bindings for 
Net::BiTorrent::LibBT::Tracker as the PHP one seems limited, in order to 
actually allow the end-user to upload torrents. This could possibly be 
done in the same httpd.conf as the tracker apache instance using 
mod_perl handlers or you could separate things out into it's own apache 
instance, therefore having bother "frontend" and "backend" tracker 
servers/apps (I guess the idea here is to make it pretty easy to run you 
own tracker service and possibly write a nice community BT web application?)

Check out the modbt-register handler and the corresponding mod_perl API 
function cxn_register of the Net::BitTorrent::LibBT::Tracker module. 
This is actually a method of this "tracker" object/module and you create 
an instance of the object like so:

my $tracker = Net::BitTorrent::LibBT::Tracker->new("/path/to/tracker");

This is covered under the Synopsis in the man/pod page for the module - 
http://www.crackerjack.net/mod_bt/Net_BitTorrent_LibBT_Tracker.html.

> At any rate, it turns out the problems i'm running into are that mod-bt
> is causing apache to segfault (which i determined after i sent this)
> since it sent the segfault message to the main apache log and not the
> one for the vhost.  But I'm working with one of the mod-bt devs on it
Sorry to hear that it's not working for you, but I believe with a bit of 
elbow grease and RTFMing (and programming knowledge) you can get this 
working. Supposedly you can get the register handler to render an HTML 
form by passing the correct params but that doesn't seem to help with 
the uploading of the .torrent file as that would need be done via some 
other means.

Dan