BitTorrent secrets

[Peter Garrett]

On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 17:55:40 +0100
Tony Arnold <tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

> Thanks, but as I reported in an earlier message, the problem is my ISP
> who throttles BT traffic to about 20kB/s. I'm going to try setting up a
> VPN connection to work and see if that overcomes their throttling.

If you can use a shell like that, you could also try "socksifying"
bittorrent with ssh. With " tsocks" ( available in the repos), you can make
virtually any program use SOCKS version 4 or 5. The config file is pretty
simple, and commented. Most people probably just need to define the socks
server as 127.0.0.1 and set their local network, in /etc/tsocks.conf . Then
you can run

ssh -NfD 1080 username at your.remote.shell

and you will have a proxy and a tunnel with which to connect. 

After that you just run

tsocks <command-for-your-app>

I haven't tried this with bittorrent, but it works well to tunnel wireless
traffic away from snoopers in public places ;) The only proviso is to have
a friendly remote shell server whose owners and/or admins don't mind you
using the bandwidth, I guess. Wiser souls may correct my assumptions ;-)

Peter