Brickfrog

they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website

Not sure what sort of uptime/reliability your friends are expecting out of a self hosted solution but for something like that you wouldn’t need much processing power, even a Raspberry Pi can host a simple website. Not sure what to recommend offhand but there are definitely vendors in that space that sell simple DIY “contact us” form software, or I guess if you wanted to roll your own that’s an option too. I’d be more concerned about keeping it locked down/secure.

Keep in mind for the internet your friends would likely need business class internet with multiple static IPs so you can give your little DIY box its own public IP address. Many (most?) residential internet service providers do not allow self hosting websites on their network and they’d be dynamic IP anyway though you could work around that somewhat with dynamic DNS since you’re going to need to purchase a domain name and point it to somewhere anyway.

run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more)

Like others said you really don’t want to go that route unless you’re well versed in that area. It would be annoying for a business especially a new one, those emails will likely keep going into other provider’s spam folders for a good period of time. All the big mainstream email providers are notorious for not trusting new email domains / new IP addresses.

Seems easier to just go to Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / whatever other provider you like to use, presumably the business has a business use case for reliable email among other things.

Bonus: Those cloud services can easily host simple contact forms for you so maybe that’s your all in one solution. Look into Google Forms and similar.

and to store and remote access documents.

That sounds like the above commercial cloud solutions again :)

But sure technically you could go through the extra step hosting that yourself. Depends on how the business wants to use/access this stuff, it’s really a question for them. Could be as simple as a Windows server with RDP (if they’re Windows people & just want to log into something “windows” to browse/open files) or maybe multi-user Linux with VNC (the geeks might like, maybe not so much the general Windows/Mac users). Or if you’re trying to do something web oriented maybe something like Nextcloud if you want to do all this in a web browser.

You should triple check what exactly they are expecting when it comes to remote access documents… you really don’t want to spend the time setting up something that they totally weren’t expecting and end up hating.

Best not to overthink it - The sales clerk is trained to ask for this stuff.

Luckily most times I encounter this I just tell them no I don’t have a phone number with them & continue checkout like normal. Sometimes that means not getting a sale price on something but usually I avoid those type of member-specific sales anyway.

And worst case - Just make something up. At Best Buy a sales rep absolutely refused to sell me something from the mobile dept without my info. Which didn’t make sense because earlier I had bought something at that same Best Buy with a different rep & that rep took my order without my info no problem (she said she had to enter a phone number but just entered Best Buy’s).

Yet this particular sales rep refused to proceed without info, so yeah he got an entire fictional name/address/phone/email on the spot.

I believe because any site that has an extension with more than four characters is detected as invalid.

Usually it’s just badly coded apps/websites that only whitelisted some of the main domains e.g. most vanity domains don’t make it through. Or sometimes there are apps/websites that purposely block your domain if the admins think it’s too spammy or whatever.

If your current email provider allows you to use their own domains as an alias that’s one way to sidestep the issue e.g. you’d end up with [something]@[youremailprovider].com --> [name]@[name].rocks

I have Fastmail & they have a ton of their own internal domains so that’s one way I sidestep that issue. It’s pretty common among most/all email providers when you bring your own domain e.g. pretty sure Proton can do the same thing. Once you have your own domain you can make up any [alias]@[yourdomain] you like or just use the provider’s as a front facing alias [alias]@[youremailprovider] --> [anything]@[yourdomain].

I don’t think it’s possible, or at least not in the way you’re thinking. Encoding a video with lossless flags usually results in a file size bigger or about the same as the source, and on top of that it takes a long time to actually do the encode.

Video is already highly compressed.

But for sure you can tinker around with ffmpeg (FOSS) & see how it goes for you. I’ve done it in the past just for kicks since some of the common video codec encoders do have lossless flags but it really wasn’t worth the effort.

EDIT: That’s just the video in the file, you also have to contend with the audio. That’s a bit easier if you just want to use ffmpeg to dump everything into FLAC but again, I don’t think you’re saving much hard drive space if any.

P.S I’ve enever used XD. So I can’t help you out there, but it seems like a very bare-bones torrent client. qbittorrent recently added support for it but if you’re running a headless server, XD doesn’t seem like a bad option. Github says it has no DHT support? Not sure if that’s the best option, but good luck with it.

Correct. To be fair both XD and qBittorrent don’t support DHT over I2P so they’re kind of on the same level there. I think (?) neither support PEX over I2P either though I’m not 100% sure on XD about that.

https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/19913

https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/7408

https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/7269

Currently not possible. Bitmagnet would need to have new code to be able to properly talk to the mainline java I2P service to enable DHT over I2P bittorrent. Or the Bitmagnet devs could develop their own I2P service to talk to the I2P network but that might be even more dev work.

https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet/issues/303

Per https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent

DHT support requires SAM v3.3 PRIMARY and SUBSESSIONS for TCP and UDP over the same session. This will require substantial development effort on the client side, unless the client is written in Java. i2pd does not currently support SAM v3.3. libtorrent does not currently support SAM v3.3.

And it’s like 3-4 hundred ish.

That should be easy for just about any torrent client (including Transmission), could be worth opening an issue at their GitHub page https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues

Hopefully switching torrent clients resolves that for you.

I’m migrating because Transmission is horrible for a large amount of torrents (multiple of hundreds)

That doesn’t sound like too many, you’re saying you’re at under 1000 torrents? How many multiples of hundreds are we talking?

Surprised Transmission has issues seeding that many, thought Transmission 4.x made improvements in that area. How much RAM does your system have? Maybe at some point you just need more system resources to handle the load.

PS - For what it’s worth you can still stick with Transmission and/or other torrent clients & just spread the torrents among multiple torrent client instances. e.g. run multiple Transmission instances with each seeding 1000 or whatever amount of torrents works for you.

It’s a nice gesture but I’m a bit doubtful that there’s enough people here to sustain a private tracker. Taking a guess at this but it seems most people here in c/piracy are general users, not specifically private tracker users - in fact a fair amount don’t even like the idea of private trackers.

!trackers@lemmy.dbzer0.com exists but it’s pretty quiet by comparison.

Not saying it’s a bad idea but it could be a while before a niche tracker like that would gain enough traction to sustain itself. And I’m just talking about a regular private tracker, not even going to touch on the idea of someone developing a “decentralized private tracker” whatever that means… TBH if you want decentralized just stick to public torrents with DHT/PEX, that’s already decentralized. Or maybe make a semi-private tracker like Demonoid if that’s more along the lines of what you want.

Not overly active but you could sub/participate in

!opensignups@lemmy.ml

!opensignups@noworriesto.day

Also !torrent_trackers@lemmy.ml (it’s more of a tracker listing community)

And right here in dbzer0 there’s !trackers@lemmy.dbzer0.com for general discussion as well.

EDIT: For specific sites / non-Lemmy you can monitor https://opentrackers.org, I kind of wonder if the admin ever made it over to Lemmy. On Reddit he goes by cuddlebunny and an earlier nick IIRC (but that’s all ancient info now probably).

This way, private torrents could “escape” into the wild, still maintaining the privacy and social/closed community effects of the private tracker.

Except that it wouldn’t. The infohash that the private flagged torrent generated is different vs a public non-private torrent of the same contents. Your suggestion would purposely share the same exact private torrent infohash into public DHT/PEX, that would certainly get people banned at the source private tracker(s). I also suspect most/all torrent client developers would consider that incorrect behavior.

If you wanted to do a more “correct” approach on this - Create a brand new public non-private flagged torrent of those contents, which would generate its own unique infohash, then it’s just a regular torrent. You’d end up needing to seed multiple copies of the same torrent (the original private flagged torrent and your new public torrent) but sure that would be possible as long as the torrent client itself has DHT/PEX enabled. Most private trackers won’t care too much but some of that does depend on individual trackers and uploaders, you’d need to check their rules.

If it’s a movie blu ray you can usually play the “index.bdmv” file in a compatible media player e.g. VLC definitely works. MPC-HC / MPC-BE works too, I think(?) MPV can play them too. As well as Jellyfin and Kodi if that’s your thing.

Alternatively browse into the “STREAM” folder, usually the biggest .m2ts file in there is the actual movie or whatever it is you want to play. The above media players can play that directly if preferred.

For TV series the above usually works too but the episodes are usually split out among multiple .m2ts files so it might be easier just to play them directly in that case.

Many sites also waive it for seeding torrents 24/7.

Not sure if it’s “many” but I’ll take your word for it. I double-checked the trackers I’m at and only 1 of them counts seeding as site/tracker activity. Seems pretty rare for private trackers to allow an account to exist without logging in indefinitely.

And with HD torrents it’s like once every 30 days

They have it set to 50 days.

Most private trackers require that you log into their website after x amount of time (usually it’s something like at least once every 90 days but you check the tracker’s own rules).

In fact most trackers usually don’t bother emailing you to remind you of this rule and will simply disable your account for inactivity.

Jellyfin should work fine for what you’re looking for. I haven’t run it on a Pi but it should work on that. You’ll be able to play music using the web ui as well as mobile apps if that’s your thing. It can also transcode on the fly so if your current browser/device/whatever can’t play .flac directly it’ll automatically transcode the playback to .mp3 or whatever it needs to be.

There are some other self hosted music/streaming projects you could take a look at that are much more built out for music playback specifically. Look into Airsonic-Advanced or Navidrome for example - I’ve been meaning to check them out myself but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Maybe private trackers? I’m not a member at these but TVCUK and TheEmpire do tend to get mentioned as trackers with that type of content.

EDIT: TheEmpire apparently does not include UK in their torrents per the other comment.

Does p2p over i2p require port forwarding?

No, you’ll torrent fine via I2P without port forwarding. Note that the torrents are running through the I2P network so technically you wouldn’t want to open your torrent client to the clearnet anyway. It’d be like purposely introducing a VPN leak in your VPN setup by allowing it traffic outside the VPN (or in this case I2P).

Been a bit since I’ve tinkered with torrents over I2P but for a while I was seeding torrents over I2P and would get pretty good seed/upload speeds to other torrent peers. Was mainly testing with i2psnark and BiglyBT.

Fun fact: Torrent hashes don’t change, so that same exact torrent you might download at TPB or wherever would still download within I2P as long as there’s someone seeding it there.

Also see https://geti2p.net/en/faq#ports

Not exactly what you’re asking but you can open a port forward for I2P itself to better communicate with other I2P routers. “routers” in this case usually means other people running I2P.

I don’t think think I have considered rTorrent before. But this one doesn’t have a remote GUI client the way deluge and transmission allow their UI to connect to a remote daemon, right?

Correct. You’re referring to the thin client, offhand I think it’s just Transmission and Deluge that have that. You don’t need a thin client for a headless torrent client setup, plenty of people do fine with a web ui. But I get it, if you prefer using a thin client then yeah Deluge or Transmission are your options for that.

re: Deluge once you have logging enabled it’ll be easier to troubleshoot things. Always seemed a bit odd that Deluge doesn’t at least enable error/warning logging by default but that’s a Deluge thing.

The behavior isn’t normal - Without the error message itself it’s hard to say. You’re not seeing any tracker errors or anything like that within Deluge right?

Otherwise shut down Deluge, enable logging, then re-start it. See “Enable Deluge Logging” in https://deluge-torrent.org/troubleshooting

Maybe you want to set the log level to “error” or “warning”, if those don’t yield anything new then set it to “info” to log whatever error it is.

Also maybe update your post with your OS and Deluge / LibTorrent version.

For what it’s worth in the past I’ve sometimes seen Deluge error on a brand new private tracker torrent, sometimes the private tracker needs a few seconds or a minute to update the tracker and show seeds/etc. - in those random cases Deluge ends up talking to the private tracker before all that & that results in it displaying some error like torrent not found at tracker, I forget exactly what the error was. It’s a bit odd since I’ve never seen rTorrent/ruTorrent have that issue, seemed like a Deluge thing. Been a while since i’ve dealt with that and can’t remember how I fixed it, think it involved having a delay before Deluge attempted to load/start the torrent.

for headless you get either Deluge or Transmission

The paid Seedbox providers usually default to rTorrent/ruTorrent for headless torrenting on their Linux based systems. Deluge/Transmission are the alternative clients in those cases.

Nowadays qBittorrent with webui enabled behaves pretty well on a headless system otherwise qbittorrent-nox is also an option.

Ah yes I think you’re right, good catch. There isn’t any distinction between a regular account vs uploader, they just use their skull system to denote “trusted” uploaders.