Trackon, The BitTorrent Tracker Tracker

Written by Ben Jones on November 17, 2009 

If you have ever used a public or open tracker, you know that reliability often comes with a half-hearted smile – trackers can go offline and return again, often without explanation or warning. To help keep track of the status of public trackers, there’s now Trackon, the BitTorrent Tracker Tracker.

Public torrent have their critics, who mostly comment that they’re slow, unverified or unreliable. Only the latter is down to the tracker itself – the others are down to peers and sites.

Often public or open trackers are heavily loaded and operated on a shoestring budget, either as an ancillary project or out of someone’s pocket. This can leave them prone to unexpected downtime, requiring DHT or additional trackers to be added to torrents in order to find peers. Additionally, the sudden announcement by The Pirate Bay to kill their tracker has left people scrambling for trackers as an alternative to DHT.

Previously, the only way to check if such a tracker was down was to ask on a forum, IRC channel or news sites like TorrentFreak, hoping that someone knows the answer. Now, though, there is Trackon, a site that hopes to provide answers to these questions in a clear, concise and simple manner.

Trackon uses the Google AppEngine, just like its sister project Atrack. This means that initial costs are low and reliability of the site should be good – exactly what is needed when it’s reliability of sites being measured.

The site currently monitors 46 public trackers, including favorites such as OpenBittorrent, and DenisStalker. Even better it a offers a recent history of status checks and also shows if trackers support SSL, which is a boon to those looking for secure communications.

Uriel, the genius behind Trackon (and also Atrack) told TorrentFreak that his motivation was finding a way to make the BitTorrent infrastructure more decentralized and reliable, without actually requiring any changes to the protocol or clients.

“My conclusion was that a really easy to deploy tracker would make it possible for anyone to set-up and run their own trackers, either private or public. Combining that with Google’s AppEngine was just logical. Trackon came from there,” he explained.

Trackon is still in development and is having more features added as time goes on. Meanwhile, the number of public trackers out there is surprising, exceeding Uriel’s own expectations, “I thought at first there would only be about a dozen trackers, but it’s over fifty now,” he told us.

If nothing else, Trackon proves that the hydra is alive, and spawning trackers.

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34 Responses

1 Nov 17, 2009 at 22:38 by Captain

Very nice idea!

2 Nov 17, 2009 at 23:12 by amazing

its a very nice idea!

3 Nov 17, 2009 at 23:25 by Anonymous

http://www.orbdesign.net/bt/

4 Nov 17, 2009 at 23:29 by Paynis

Wonder when a BitTorrent Tracker Tracker Tracker will come out.

5 Nov 17, 2009 at 23:33 by Anon

Meh Piratebay is trying to kill the tracker and here we have this site doing what i can to carve out a niche on whats left of trackers.

6 Nov 17, 2009 at 23:34 by Statikk

Reminds me of the old Hotline Tracker Tracker website. =P

7 Nov 17, 2009 at 23:36 by EC665

valuable site, thanks Uriel

8 Nov 18, 2009 at 00:12 by Dude

The tracker for TPB has not worked for the past 3 months or how ever long I have been using public sites since demonoids been down.. which hopefully demonoid comes back up soon I hate public sites people fuss about what country their from and just pitty stuff I miss you demonoid!

9 Nov 18, 2009 at 00:16 by Nea

Dude, that shows how much you know – no tracker? HAHAHAHAHA!

10 Nov 18, 2009 at 00:26 by Snyke

I wonder why the shut down of TPB tracker leaves people looking for alternatives to DHT. I anything it should drive more people towards this completely P2P way of tracking torrents. Not to mention that DHT is pretty fast, scalable far beyond any traditional tracker and really hard to shut down :-)

11 Nov 18, 2009 at 01:00 by rakiru

I noticed someone posted this site in the comments of the last post.

12 Nov 18, 2009 at 01:04 by Ben Jones

We’ve been aware of it for some time. I’ve been talking with the developer for over a month, but we waited until the site was stable before publishing. One that collapses under load is no good to anyone.

13 Nov 18, 2009 at 01:16 by MissedMemories

a tracker that trackes trackers.. what a nice word trick =)

But yeah, i’ll be helpfull to track stadistics… Tho i vote for trackerless torrents.

14 Nov 18, 2009 at 01:32 by JH

“Bittorrent Tracker Tracker”

LOL! XD

15 Nov 18, 2009 at 01:59 by dandin1

Rather limited as it can only query trackers on ports 80, 443, 4443, 8080, 8081, 8082, 8083, 8084, 8085, 8086, 8087, 8088, 8089, 8188, 8444, 8990.

Without 6969 in there, it’s missing the best trackers.

16 Nov 18, 2009 at 05:06 by nope

to
>5 Nov 17, 2009 at 23:33 by Anon

LOL tpb isn’t even a real tracker

they aren’t killing anything, other than needless press on the community

17 Nov 18, 2009 at 05:14 by Xcel

TPB is NOT trying to kill trackers, trackers are still necessary Ppl..
Hence the reason behind the openBT tracker and the publicBT tracker..
To initially UL a torrent you need a tracker, once seeded then DLers can use the magnet links and DHT/PEX…

No TPB is not dead
No TBP isnt killing anything
No the world isnt going to end in our lifetimes
And yes, if you still believe the opposite of anything above you are a dork…

18 Nov 18, 2009 at 05:41 by Dark Logic

I really wish that anyone who has no idea whats they are talking about would not post anything its just as bad as spam. how many times does someone have to say No TPB is not dead
No TBP isnt killing anything
becase some tard cant read the entire thred before posting
is the a Mess B that you have to pass an IQ test before you can post?

19 Nov 18, 2009 at 07:33 by Gustav

Look guys I need help with a question:

Rapidshare allows you to download files for free, with a wait-limit for download and a fifteen minute wait minimum after download. You all probably know this. However, is it possible for a potential downloader functioning by such means to be tracked and prosecuted? Is this considered illegal if Rapidshare is allowing this in their system as well as advocating it by virtue of allowing it to become freely available? Is this piracy? Is such a direct-download P2P? Basically; would I be in danger? Yes I’m a newb.

20 Nov 18, 2009 at 08:16 by BlackFlag

This Trackon is a fucking terrible idea…its like one-stop money shop for the MAFIAA or whoever else decides to jump in and start harvesting IPs and dealing out faulty law suits

21 Nov 18, 2009 at 08:51 by Anonymous

Gustav, try to stay on topic, okay?
Go ask in a forum next time about something off-topic.

Yes, it can be tracked easily as it’s centralized servers you’re downloading off of.
Rapidshare doesn’t advocate piracy, they work with companies to delete content that is deemed illegal by them, using hashes of the files and so on across the servers to find and remove said content.

If you want something that allows you fast access to files, with decentralized servers and encryption via SSL, try Usenet. Go Google it.

To get back on topic, this seems like a pretty interesting idea.
Thanks for pointing it out, TF.

I’m really pleased with how things are progressing too with DHT and magnet links, evolution is finally here.

I think there’s going to be a need for trackers still, mostly private ones though, but I’m not so sure we really need public ones so much now.

22 Nov 18, 2009 at 10:32 by Professor Towsly

thanks for the heads up
ed2k & kad work fine too
http://www.emule-project.net

23 Nov 18, 2009 at 10:52 by Anonymous

really interesting

24 Nov 18, 2009 at 10:57 by Anon

So they finally got out of Beta stage & took down the “don’t post to Torrentfreak” message eh?

Good to see they’re getting things together. Just wish they offered a uTorrent ready text version of the currently working trackers…

At least they have the api…

: )

25 Nov 18, 2009 at 13:46 by gn

@15

This is a limitation of the App Engine itself and it currently only allows these ports, not of Trackon. I’ve requested they open ports 2710 and 6969 too, but so far, no reply at all from the Google folks.

PS: I’m one of the two admins of Trackon. The other, of course, being Uriel himself.

26 Nov 18, 2009 at 13:49 by gn

@20

lol? You think MAFIAA needs Trackon or else they can’t find things out? Are you kidding me?

27 Nov 18, 2009 at 14:00 by gn

@24

http://www.trackon.org/api/live

uTorrent requires an empty line between each tracker, yes? I will talk to Uriel about this

28 Nov 18, 2009 at 14:34 by Anonymous

I just tried this and a grip of the sites it claimed were down weren’t.

29 Nov 18, 2009 at 14:52 by gn

@28

and which where those that are up but are indicated as down on Trackon? Remember that Trackon has an interval and it doesn’t check every single second. If tracker is up when it checks for it, it will indicate as it being up, not as down.

30 Nov 18, 2009 at 15:18 by James Holdger

http://www.anirena.com/announce

http://www.trackon.org/incoming-log

2009/11/18 13:06 – Incoming tracker check for http://tracker.anirena.com/announce failed

You might want to fix that.

The anirena admins does not know how to set up a proper redirection.

Anyway, nice project!

31 Nov 19, 2009 at 02:18 by gn

@30

We’re not here to fix other people’s problems. If they can’t set up a proper redirect, then it won’t be added to Trackon.

32 Nov 19, 2009 at 19:35 by richard

I know this site allready for some weeks… verry good site

33 Nov 19, 2009 at 23:49 by Ninja

Yet it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Go MAFIAA-chu, Thunder-sue-shock them!

P2P wins. Flawless Victory. Waiting for the fatality lmao.

34 Nov 24, 2009 at 01:43 by Kickass_Sid

Very cool website! I just hope that it wont go down too often like the listed trackers

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