I’m excited to announce the first alpha preview of this project that I’ve been working on for the past 4 months. I’m initially posting about this in a few small communities, and hoping to get some input from early adopters and beta testers.
What is a DHT crawler?
The DHT crawler is Bitmagnet’s killer feature that (currently) makes it unique. Well, almost unique, read on…
So what is it? You might be aware that you can enable DHT in your BitTorrent client, and that this allows you find peers who are announcing a torrent’s hash to a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), rather than to a centralized tracker. DHT’s lesser known feature is that it allows you to crawl the info hashes it knows about. This is how Bitmagnet’s DHT crawler works works - it crawls the DHT network, requesting metadata about each info hash it discovers. It then further enriches this metadata by attempting to classify it and associate it with known pieces of content, such as movies and TV shows. It then allows you to search everything it has indexed.
This means that Bitmagnet is not reliant on any external trackers or torrent indexers. It’s a self-contained, self-hosted torrent indexer, connected via the DHT to a global network of peers and constantly discovering new content.
The DHT crawler is not quite unique to Bitmagnet; another open-source project, magnetico was first (as far as I know) to implement a usable DHT crawler, and was a crucial reference point for implementing this feature. However that project is no longer maintained, and does not provide the other features such as content classification, and integration with other software in the ecosystem, that greatly improve usability.
Currently implemented features of Bitmagnet:
- A DHT crawler
- A generic BitTorrent indexer: Bitmagnet can index torrents from any source, not only the DHT network - currently this is only possible via the /import endpoint; more user-friendly methods are in the pipeline
- A content classifier that can currently identify movie and television content, along with key related attributes such as language, resolution, source (BluRay, webrip etc.) and enriches this with data from The Movie Database
- An import facility for ingesting torrents from any source, for example the RARBG backup
- A torrent search engine
- A GraphQL API: currently this provides a single search query; there is also an embedded GraphQL playground at /graphql
- A web user interface implemented in Angular: currently this is a simple single-page application providing a user interface for search queries via the GraphQL API
- A Torznab-compatible endpoint for integration with the Serverr stack
Interested?
If this project interests you then I’d really appreciate your input:
- How did you get along with following the documentation and installation instructions? Were there any pain points?
- There’s a roadmap of high-priority features on the website - what do you see as the highest priority for near-term development?
- If you’re a developer, are you interested in contributing to the project?
Thanks for your attention. If you’re interested in this project and would like to help it gain momentum then please give it a star on GitHub, and expect further updates soon!
Your data footprint would be less. Maintenance is a breeze. If you update your image and it breaks, just roll it back. Less consumption of resources. No need to divide your storage and ram for VMs. There are millions of docker images so you can start something new in seconds. And the learning curve isn’t too bad if you’re on truenas scale. Truenas core is a NAS operating system built on freebsd (Unix), and truenas scale is built on Linux. Both use ZFS for the underlying storage.
OK so my current strategy is that when I want to do a major update I simply make a copy of the vm image file, then I can drop it back in place if something goes wrong. I run KVM which means it just gives out CPU and memory as needed even though I can set maximums. The resources I’m using are laughably small anyway, half the systems run fine on a single cpu core although it was nice to recently bump web and mail services up higher (I just upgraded over the Summer from Poweredge 860 servers to some R620’s – crazy difference in available resources!). Same with memory, I have some systems running on as little as 512M, but I just bumped my web servers up to 8G to give them plenty of room. Considering I have 64G in each server with tons of space for growth, I’m not worried about any of that. And storage space… well it seems linux is suffering with bloat since the introduction of systemd as I’ve had to increase my image files from 4G to 8G for updates, but it’s still a drop in the bucket for storage. And all the services use shared storage space for things like email and websites, and I have around 105TB of shared storage, so again not really a concern.
Now it sounds like I kind of need TrueNas to easily use docker, which means another system that I would need to learn from scratch? Truenas scale says it’s built on debian and yet there are no debian packages available to install it, so I can only assume that I would have to completely replace all of my existing servers with brand new systems that I have no knowledge of troubleshooting, just so I can replace all of my existing VMs with docker images which I also have no knowledge of how to troubleshoot.
Sorry but none of this is selling me on the idea - it just sounds like I’m supposed to replace systems that work perfectly well with new systems that I can’t fix when they break? I’m really not understanding where the advantage is.
Not trying to sell you on it, you do what works best for you. Truenas scale is an operating system built on Debian. There will be no packages for it. It’s hard to explain until you start using it. I came from VMs on truenas core for many years and it was annoying to migrate to docker but after I used it for a while I liked it a lot more. It’s hard to explain without just using it, so if you’re not into playing around and what you have works great, then great. I’ve been working with jails and VMs and containers for well over 15 years since I work in IT so I’ve played with big and small systems. There are definitely some annoyances when it comes to the VM approach.
No worries, and thanks for all the info. Eventually I’ll have some time to look into docker, but for now it’s just an aggravation to me when it used to be a simple matter of just running a couple commands to compile something.