Question

From what I know, when seeding or leeching torrent, your IP is on tracker and it remains there for some few hours or days How do I manually tell my the tracker using Libtorrent I am no longer going to be connected to the tracker and it should forget my IP as I am neither seeding nore leeching. Any code bits or advices would be appreciated, currently I am using Python binding provided by rasterbar but I am okay with C++ code too.

Answer 1

libtorrent automatically does this when stopping a torrent, or stopping the session. If it seems to fail, you might want to increase the tracker timeout when shutting down. This will add to the shutdown delay, but will give some more overloaded trackers some more time. See session_settings::stop_tracker_timeout. By default this is 5 seconds, but sometimes trackers take much longer than that to respond, up to 30 seconds.

Trackers typically time out peers in about an hour, and you need to re-announce every 30 minutes to stay alive.

If you’re trying to just send the stopped event to trackers, using a separate bittorrent client (in this case, assuming whatever client you’re using fails to send stopped events to the trackers), it might be a bit less reliable.

You’re supposed to include the info-hash (i.e. the unique identifier for the torrent), your key which the client generates on startup, peer-id (which is also generated by the client) and transfer statistics, in the tracker request.

You can get away with omitting the statistics, but if you don’t know the info-hash or the client key, and in some cases the peer-id, the tracker won’t be able to figure out that your request actually refers to your client’s tracker request, and it won’t remove your IP.

In practice, for the most part you might be able to get it to work by just knowing the info-hash and tracker URL. You can get the info-hash by loading the .torrent file, grabbing the info-hash and tracker URLs out of it.