I confess that I do not know a lot about BitTorrent. So I picked up a dummies book about it at the public library. Here is what I learned.BitTorrent traffic accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic. That might be because it is suitable to transmission of large files. We are talking about Gigabyes here. The file sharing is distributed, which is different from FTP where there is one serving giving you the goods.
There is a lot of vocabulary in the BitTorrent world. A torrent is a small file containing the table of contents for a file. A leecher is somebody who has not downloaded the entire file yet. A seed, on the other hand, has the whole file and is sharing it.
A swarm is the set of leechers and seeds for a given file. Trackers are web server software packages that manage the interaction between seeds and leeches. Now down to a bit of technical data. BitTorrent uses ports 6881 through 6889 for its communications. So open up those ports in your firewall.
