At Fri, 2 Jan 2004 17:42:49 -0700 (MST), Justin Findlay wrote: > > I have lookerd over the bittorrent homepage a few times to try to figure > out what I am doing wrong, yet I have found nothing resembling a solution. > What I want to know is how to download files using bittorrent. There is > no "howto download a bittorrent", so I figured that this means you just > download the .torrent file itself and this will download your bittorrented > file, but this doesn't seem to work: after downloading the .torrent file, > nothing happens. Perhaps this has something to do with the firewall on my > machine, but I am unwilling to do anything to the firewall configuration, > like cutting a hole in it, without knowing how it should be done. > Learning the Linux iptables seems expensive in both time and knowledge, > both of which I don't have a lot of. Is there any thing I can do to make > it work? Is there an easy way to modify the firewall to allow for > bittorrent use?
I feel your pain, man, having been through the same frustration. First of all, just type something like: btdownloadgui.py whateveritis.torrent in the directory where that little .torrent file that you downloaded is. That should start bittorrent and do the actual download of the stuff you want. The .torrent file contains the info that bittorrent needs to do it's magic. I guess in a perfect world your web-browser would realize that when you click on a .torrent file it should run bittorrent on it and not just download it. Alas... If that doesn't work, then you may need a port or two opened on your firewall. I totally agree that there needs to be an easier way to poke holes in your firewall then learning all that crazy iptables syntax. Fortunately someone else who agrees may have actually done something about it: try webmin. I don't know what distro you have, but for me it's Mandrake and I was able to use the webmin shorewall (the name of the firewall Mandrake uses) configuration thinger and open the needed ports. It wasn't too hard. If you are using RedHat, well, wait a little longer and someone who knows about Redhat's firewall should pipe up :) Bryan _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
