Sharing trackless torrent files from a RaspberryPi that is running as its own Wireless Access Point

Question

Firstly a little bit of background effectively I'm working on a project to develop a RaspberryPi controlled drone which is able to fly to and then transfer files to remote clients without internet using P2P file transfers.

The raspberryPi's OS is Emlid's Navio2 modified distro of Raspbian with some programs like ArduPilot and ROS preinstalled for flight control. The raspberryPi hosts its own Wireless Access Point for flight control and file sharing. I followed this guide: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/access-point.md

Using a separate LAN not connected to the internet I have been able to transfer files using various trackless torrent clients between a Mac and a windows machine. However when I try to do this between the raspberry pi and my Mac in either direction using the Access Point hosted by the RaspberryPi I am unable to get any files to transfer between the two. Both devices can PING!!! each other and communicate via SSH. I have tried the Transmission, qBitTorrent and Deluge clients on both sides with no success. Transmission on the raspberrypi reported that the port it used was closed but upon running MacOS's port scan I could see that the port was open.

I'm really not sure what I'm missing here and I'm a little stuck. If anyone could offer some assistance it would be greatly appreciated.

Nathaniel

Answer 1

Testing for an open port in torrent clients is done by sending a request to a special server which then tries to "call back" on a given IP:PORT. Obviously, this will not work without the Internet, but it's also not the problem.

Trackless torrents need to contain valid nodes in order to start communication:

nodes = [["<host>", <port>], ["<host>", <port>], ...]

Host addresses should be valid within your AP network. That is, they should be either local IP addresses, or you need a local DNS server correctly resolving the names. Check what you have there.

Note that DHT only makes sense when nodes can go offline without affecting others. In your case, if your AP goes offline no data transmission can happen, so DHT doesn't make much sense. Host a torrent tracker on your Pi: it will be much simpler to set up and it will work better.