qBittorrent official forums

Hi all,
TL;DR
My question boils down to is does qbittorent problem with ctorrent created files? If so is there a way using qbittorrent-nox terminal commands or webUI to create a torrent?  How can I create my own torrent file that can be seeded and shared using qbittorent?

Basically what I need is to share large files between cluster nodes in a LAN using, as I understand it, Local Peer Discovery. I found qbittorent and it seems to do what I need, but I am having issues with the actual sharing.

The current situation is I am trying this on two nodes, one with the files (that should be seeding) and one without them. I am using qbittorent-nox on both to run the torrent file and viewing it on the webUI (as the nodes don't have GUI). The problem is that the node thats suppose to be seeding doesn't realize it already has the file and show it at 0% downloaded, and thus doesn't seed.

I am guessing the problem might have something to do with the fact that I created the torrent file using ctorrent, though if I run the torrent with ctorrent it does recognize it and goes into seeding mode.

So my question boils down to (as mentioned in TL;DR) is does qbittorent problem with ctorrent created files? If so is there a way using qbittorrent-nox terminal commands or webUI to create a torrent?  How can I create my own torrent file that can be seeded and shared using qbittorent? Is what I want to do even possible with qbittorrent?

Thanks for any help available!

Well after re-reading your post...
1) The two .torrent files MUST match. Just copy it over.
2) Make sure the download dir is set up correctly AND the files are right where they should be.

These are the two most common problems that can cause this.


(Very tl;dr: I recommend using Transmission to create the torrents.
Just install "transmission-cli" - it's a tiny package. Whatever version your Linux has.

Then use the command line command to create the torrent:
https://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtopic.php?t=7455

But if you use the "man" command, you can check the current syntax.
Like so: "man transmission-cli"

Good luck!)

Thanks for the fast reply!
You were right, the downloads location was messing me up.

Now I have a problem where it appears to have downloaded 100% in less than visible seconds (which makes sense, my test case is less than a mb) but when I look at the files that I downloaded they are all unreadable gibrish. Also I no longer see any peers or seeds on either of my nodes which seems odd as I haven't changed anything else.

Is this also a known problem maybe?

I had the same results when initially trying to download with ctorrent and it never got peers but it created the files the torrent specified with the same gibrish (again in a matter of seconds). I will try using transmission (need to get higher up cluster manager to install it for me..) and let you know if it solved it though.

Also if it is somehow relevant I am using Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS 64bit

Thanks again for the help!

This sounds all very weird. The client should not mess up the filenames in any case.
Are you SURE the filenames are really gibberish? Are you using UTF-8 in your SSH client for example?
I mean the problems you are having are unrelated to qBittorrent, it's more about the quirks of using Linux.

The filenames are ok, the contents are gibrish.

Just did the same thing with a torrent created with transmission-create and I have the same issue - the directory and all files inside get created and it seems good until you look inside the files and see that they are gibrish..

it's more about the quirks of using Linux

I guess I can try ask this in the ubuntu forums as well, if they will recommend siomething that works ill be sure to update it here too.

Thanks for all the help!  Otherwise please tell me if the fact that its whats inside the file thats gibrish, and not the filename, makes a difference for you and if you have any other ideas.

So I don't know if this is relevant but I found that on both computers I get the the following error when running qbittorrent-nox: I found that in other programs this means that there is a file in /var/lock that needs to be deleted, but I didn't find a file that looks related in any of the computers. It also seems to be due in those situations to the fact that it is installed on an nfs server, as it is in my case aswell, so maybe there is something special I need to do for this case?
I couldn't find anything on this issue in this forum.

What can cause this? and is this related to my problem?

So this is embarrassing, I might have had it working all along. I just re-checked and the files I was transferring were corrupted on one of my earlier tries and I have been using them since.

So to sum up this is what worked for me if anybody else ends up needing the same setup:
I create torrents using "transmission-create /path/to/file/or/directory/to/be/torrented -o /path/to/output/directory/output_file_name.torrent" (this is because qbittorrent-nox doesn't provide a tool that I could find to create torrents) 
I run the torrent on the computer with the actual files so it will seed using "qbittorrent-nox ~/path/to/torrent/file/name_of_file.torrent"
I copy the .torrent file to all nodes and run "qbittorrent-nox ~/path/to/torrent/file/name_of_file.torrent" to start downloading

qbittorrent settings I needed to configure:
In "Downloads" change "Save files to location" to the location of the data in the node that is going to be seeding #otherwise that node wont know it has the files specified in the torrent and wont seed them.

In "Speed" tab uncheck "Enable bandwidth management (uTP)"        #
                          uncheck "Apply rate limit to uTP connections"              #This is to avoid issues with the torrents sometimes starting as
                                                                                                                          #queued and requiring a "force resume"
In "BitTorrent" tab uncheck "Torrent Queueing"                                      #This doesn't appear to have fixed the problem 100% though

Thanks for all the help and Im sorry I hassled people for no reason..