How to run a Bittorrent mirror for various torrents e.g. from XML feeds?

Question

I have a virtual server which acts mainly as mail server. I wonder whether I could set up a mirror for certain files like Linux ISO images, conference talk recordings and other stuff.

How could I seed automatically all torrents from XML feeds plus torrents added by hand?

Further conditions:

• The data files should be accessable via HTTP/FTP, too
• total traffic and bandwidth uage need to be restricted, plus bonus points for restrictions per feed or file

I hope to get a suggestion for a system which imports the feeds automatically and works without much maintenance. Any existing free software for GNU/Linux or something easily to implement in short time is okay. Recommendations highly appreciated! :)

Answer 1

You can use rTorrent to do what you want. It's included with most Linux distributions.

You can configure a directory you can just drop .torrent files in via SFTP or WebDAV. You can use the RSSDler add-on to automatically download from torrent RSS feeds. (I assume that's what you meant by XML.)

To be able to download data files (and optionally upload) via HTTP you'll have to use lighttpd, Apache, or other suitable web server software.

You can configure settings globally in a configuration file and per-torrent via the user interfaces. It has a full-featured text-based interface which you can access via SSH. There are also a number of web-based frontends as well as one for Mac. Finally there is a XMLRPC API so you can do all sorts of things programatically.