Hi people! I have been pirating for myself for over 30 years now, and with the ever growing size of warez and the laughable upstream limit my ISP has, i have come to the point where it’s not practical to maintain a 1:1 ratio for all torrents anymore - my active torrent list keeps growing beyond practical limits, and i’m someone who wants to keep sharing things for the people after me, esp. torrents with low amounts of seeds.

I’m pretty sure that i know more than i think i do, but i would be happy about a few pointers to get started with a seedbox. i have beginner linux skills, advanced user skills, and not shy of reading manuals on how to get things to work. i have not tinkered with docker much yet, but i’m willing to learn.

Edit: From what i’ve learned and seen i tend towards an dedicated server since i might want to host other services for myself too, so suggestions for what hoster to look at are welcome!

  • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    thanks for the info! I’m already covered on the VPN front incl port forwarding at least, opsec is a thing for me since the music industry started sending out love letters to napster users in europe :-)

    i’d rather do it myself, since i want to learn as much as possible, including setting up an -arr stack. what hoster is performant and not too expensive?

    • skankhunt42@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      I selfhost everything I use, including the *arr stack. I do have a VPS with hetzner.com and they’re pretty good but I wouldn’t personally host torrent or *arr with them. If you want someone else to host I’d suggest doing the research and finding something that works for you. My only experience is 5+ years ago with dediseedbox.com so YMMV if you choose them. They do have a cheap-ish VPS.

      I think Docker is the way to go either on a VPS or on your own box. If you like a webUI for it use https://www.portainer.io/.

      If you do go with docker be very careful about what ports you expose, you can easily open up everything publicly so be sure to double check and bind almost everything to 127.0.0.1.

      If you have any specific questions I’d be happy to help.

      • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
        1·
        16 hours ago

        I use protonvpn, which has a very nice windows client and a not so nice, but functional Linux client (don’t know about MacOS). Port forwarding works either way, and you have the option of using wireguard or OpenVPN. Their website has a lot of tutorials.

        I liked mullvad too, and they are cheaper, but I switched a few months ago because I got a deal for protonvpn and wanted to check out if port forwarding makes any difference for getting my share ratio back in order (and with a seedbox already in mind)

          • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
            1·
            7 hours ago

            I don’t have any opinion on them regarding their performance. with proton there exist case files which show that they do not keep logs when not court ordered to do so (in the case i know about, they had to be court ordered to activate logs for login attempts to a specific mailbox). I haven’t heard anything bad about Mullvad either.

            Windscribe seems to be fine, but they had at least one big misstep where a private key for OpenVPN was saved locally on a server that then was seized by authorities. PIA, on the other hand, had no issues hiring a criminally convicted CTO and merged with Kape Technologies, which was in the business of creating browser toolbars containing potientially unwanted programs.They have been audited in 2022 tho, so maybe they are alright now…

      • skankhunt42@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        22 hours ago

        https://www.ovpn.com/en

        BUT, I’m not sure how well it works… While rutorrent says port forwarding is working, and It seems to be from my tests… Checking randomly the only peers I see that connect to me also have ovpn IPs so I’m not sure if I’m actually accessible or not.