btReAnnounceR

First up (remember this) slow downloads do not mean there are problems with the trackers or that the tracker is down.

If your torrent is new to your client, meaning your client has never downloaded, partially downloaded or attempted to download a torrent with the same hash_id and your client displays any number of seeds/peers its a safe bet the tracker is running fine.

For the purposes of this explanation lets just say trackers behave sort of like an introduction agency.

You tell them what you're interested in (the download) and they find other parties who have the same interests (peers and seeds) and put you in touch with them.

Ok, moving on to the point.

What if you cant connect to a tracker?
It could mean any number of things, some of the basic problems could be any of:

* The tracker could be down – the tracker server software is not running
* The Tracker is choked – the tracker server software is running but too busy to respond in a timely manner
* The Web Server is down – the server software (think apache) that serves the tracker web pages is not running or it is too busy to respond in a timely manner
* The Host is Down – The server (machine) is not up and running
* Permissions – you may not have permission to access the running tracker or the torrent in question
* ISP/Other Block – somewhere along the wire between your machine and the tracker the ip address or port range is being blocked

There are many things you can do to track down where the problem lies,

I'll explain their use and give examples in up-coming parts, but the point is, apart from screaming at someone, all this doesn't help you get your download, what you need is more trackers.

More trackers are the key to completing your download. Somewhere out there there must (hopefully) be a tracker that knows about the download you want.

Finding that tracker is an art. It can mean a lot of trial and error.

Fortunately many bittorrent clients these days support the use of multiple trackers per torrent, this is facilitated by the clients and an extension to the protocol, the announce-list.

For these clients, you can usually just paste in a list of additional trackers, and if your client can reach any of them, you are on your way.

Before I go on, you should all know I still use a headless (command line) client that does not support the announce-list (there's a good reason for this), so I have to find at least one tracker that works for a download.

Google helps, plus there are a few good torrent sites that can provide a list of trackers for a torrent.
I get started with a two keyword search for announce urls, in the form of:
(in google's search bar)
b1be5bb3e6c93c9e7eb8183a4946a1888c33adb2 announce

which is the hash-id of the torrent followed by the word 'announce'

Find an alternate tracker, ping it, if its reachable re-announce the torrent, and see if it starts, if it doesn't, start over with another one.

Its tedious, but it can be done, I've been completing stuck downloads this way for years.

[End Part 1]