[Solved] What is this? - They're dead trackers

[Gordon]

I'm seeing a line like this every few minutes in the webserver log. Clearly it's from filetransferdaemon, but what is it trying to do? I cannot find any reference towards a /announce script in either the webroot or the apache2 config files.

127.0.0.1 - - [01/Oct/2012:20:15:53 +0200] "GET /announce?info_hash=somethingsomething&peer_id=-LT0100-(lpYNVMKbv.D&port=something&uploaded=24137471791&downloaded=0&left=0&corrupt=0&event=started&key=something&compact=1&numwant=200&supportcrypto=1&no_peer_id=1 HTTP/1.0" 404 470 "-" "excito-ftd 0.55;libtorrent"

[DanielM]

Not sure exactly what it is, but it has something with ftd to do. That's the file transfer daemon, which is used for downloading torrents. Do you have any active torrents?

/Daniel

[Gordon]

I do. From what I gather these are supposed to be some kind of status updates and it would seem that it only makes these calls if there's an actual change (the intervals of the messages vary). What bothers me is that it makes a call to a non-existing webpage. Is this an error in my web configuration (i.e. does everybody else have a /announce page that does not return a 404) or is it a problem with filetransferdaemon?

[DanielM]

I haven't used ftd in a while (Transmission is actually better in all aspects) but when looking in my Apache access logs I see the same (only I had to dig back a while), so it's not only you. Guess some Excito staff needs to kick in here to answer, but it seems like some minor bug to me.

/Daniel

[johannes]

looks like a bug, reported, thanks!

[Gordon]

Having installed Transmission bittorrent client I noticed that it too is making those connections and searching for an "/announce" script (and a second script "/scrape"). As it turns out these are the result of dead trackers that resolve to localhost. Or should I say "killed on government authority" here, because one of those dead trackers is the one from piratebay.

I wrote this little script here that other Transmission users can use to remove those dead trackers and the overhead they create.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

# Change this to meet your credentials
Auth="user:pw"

# Fetch list of active torrents
Torrents=$(transmission-remote -n $Auth -l | grep -v "^ID" | \
  grep -v "^Sum" | awk '{print $1}' | sed "s/\*//")

for Torrent in $Torrents; do
  # Find trackers for this torrent
  transmission-remote -n $Auth -t $Torrent -it | grep "Tracker.*:[0-9][0-9]*$" | \
    sed "s/[:\/]/ /g" | awk '{print $2 " " $4}' | sort -gr | \
    while read ID tracker_hostname; do
      echo -en "\r$hostname                                                   \r"
      # Check whether this tracker resolves to localhost
      trackerlocal=$(host $tracker_hostname|grep "127.0.0.1")
      if [ ! -z "$trackerlocal" ]; then
        echo removing Tracker $tracker_hostname because it resolves to localhost
        transmission-remote -n $Auth -t $Torrent -tr $ID
      fi
  done
done
echo  "                                                            "