BitTorrent Behind the Scenes with isoHunt & BTjunkie

xXx · #1 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 01:06 PM

In this ‘behind the scenes’ series we will try to uncover some of the mystery that surrounds BitTorrent sites and the people who run them. First up the the founder of BTjunkie, one of the most visited torrent sites, and one of the guys behind the newly launched PublicBT tracker.

“So this is my mission control, believe it or not I bought most of this stuff with baccarat winnings,” he told TorrentFreak, while sharing two pictures of his home base with us. Below he walks us through his current setup.

Desktop 1: My fastest desktop is a Dell XPS 630 with Intel® Core™2 E8400, 2GB RAM, 500GB SATA + 1TB external., and Dual nVidia GeForce 9800GT video card. This machine is hooked up to the very nice 25.5″ Samsung Syncmaster 2693HM monitor.

Desktop 2: The computer next to the XPS is a home built Athlon 64 3GHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB SATA, and it’s hooked up to 17″ Samsung SyncMaster 173P.

Laptop: The laptop is the Samsung X460: Intel Core2 Duo P7350, 3GB RAM, 14″ WXGA screen, and weighs only 1.29kg.

Server: The server I’m setting up to send to a data center is the IBM 326m with Opteron 280, 4GB RAM, 73GB 15K SCSI.

Misc: I have a little apple in my diet, I use my jail broken iphone for monitoring servers & tethering on the go. For all my paper work I use the Canon MP620. The speakers & sub are the Altec Lansing VS4221.

To top it off the BTjunkie founder told us that his Internet connection was just upgraded to a 30Mbit connection. Below are the pictures of his current setup and links to the larger sized images.

Source: BitTorrent Behind the Scenes: BTjunkie | TorrentFreak

This summer TorrentFreak features the workstations and offices belonging to some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community. In our first article in this series the founder of BTjunkie was kind enough to give us a little insight into his daily operations, and today we continue with isoHunt.

Founded in 2003, isoHunt is one of the oldest BitTorrent sites that remains around today. The site has millions of pageviews a day and searches through more than 2 million torrent files, which totals an impressive 1729 terabytes of data.

Gary Fung, the founder of the site, is in charge of daily operations from his hometown Vancouver in Canada. Below is a picture of Gary sitting behind his 2008 Mac Pro hooked up to a Dell 30″ LCD monitor (3008WFP).

What’s really keeping the site up and running is not his Mac though, rather the 14 servers located in Ontario, Canada. Below is a picture of the server rack currently in use. Gary told us that he is working on adding another cluster in Europe soon.

isoHunt is currently using four dual quadcore Opteron 2352’s for the web servers. The site’s database runs on three additional servers, two Opteron and one Intel Nehalem based. Four old dual core AMD nodes are used for various background processing, one Intel, dualcore Xeon is used by the search backend and two more for load balancing.

Below you’ll find another picture isoHunt’s server rack, all wired up. We thank Gary for sharing this with us, and we will continue our behind the scenes series this weekend with a brand new workspace of another torrent site admin.

Source: BitTorrent Behind the Scenes: isoHunt | TorrentFreak

raksrules · #2 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 01:53 PM

OT
All said and done, no one still knows who aXXo is ???

xXx · #3 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 03:15 PM

aXXo is been missing from the Torrent Scene since March....

kuduku · #4 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 03:22 PM

but aXXos quality is way ahead of others

aruka · #5 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 03:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raksrules

OT
All said and done, no one still knows who aXXo is ???

^ROFL!!!

raksrules · #6 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 03:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kuduku

but aXXos quality is way ahead of others

Most of the people would not agree to this statement. In fact from what i know aXXo takes scene releases and then rips them again (or whatever) and then releases. I am actually content with those rips as tend to watch them on either my laptop or normal CRT TV.
The reason he is famous is for his DVDRips and 1CD Size.

H@cKer · #7 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 03:29 PM

aXXo is a group of people rather than a single person afaik

raksrules · #8 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 03:34 PM

^^ any source of info.

I had read somewhere about the interview of aXXo but i suppose that was fake. Who knows.

H@cKer · #9 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 03:44 PM

cant remember the source.Got some more info

Quote:

Axxo is an internet alias that an unknown individual uses to upload quality content on numerous different torrent sites. There are usually one or two main names that the Axxo files are uploaded by. The majority is found to be by "circlensess". However, it has been rumored that she (I have also found that it is in fact a female) is going to take a break from the torrents as it is very time-consuming. However, there is a successor to circlensess. The name of the persons uploading Axxo content now is ".BONE." and "Akhexxo".

So in conclusion, Axxo usually guarantees quality torrents but is not just a "label" for quality. The Axxo name is king in the torrent community.

Quote:

"aXXo is the Internet alias of an individual allegedly harassed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement. aXXo became popular for converting commercial DVD movies into media files that are then uploaded on the Internet for free download."

Ravi_D · #10 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 04:59 PM

who's FXG then?

aXXo=FXG, some noob p2p group stealing from scene.

malhotraraul · #11 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 06:18 PM

there were rumors that AXXO died in a car accident

morgoth · #12 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 06:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ravi_D

who's FXG then?

aXXo=FXG, some noob p2p group stealing from scene.

Bulls**t. That's a very grand claim. And what does scene stand for? If stealing is such a big deal, then why at all steal from movie studios or content owners.

Is it not about "information wants to be free?" I don't see how scene can be considered paragon of virtue if encoders like aXXo or FXG are regarded as thieves. Folks who themselves "steal" can't cry over someone copying their stuff.

xXx · #13 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 06:26 PM

b/w look @ that Gary Fung using his Dell 30″ LCD monitor (3008WFP).

PiXeLpUsHeR · #14 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 07:43 PM

who the bleep care's who axxo is... jeez it's like a broken record in the p2p circles

blr_p · #15 (**permalink**) 30 Jul 09, 08:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by xXx

Founded in 2003, isoHunt is one of the oldest BitTorrent sites that remains around today. The site has millions of pageviews a day and searches through more than 2 million torrent files, which totals an impressive 1729 terabytes of data.

...

What’s really keeping the site up and running is not his Mac though, rather the 14 servers located in Ontario, Canada. Below is a picture of the server rack currently in use. Gary told us that he is working on adding another cluster in Europe soon.

What's keeping his site up is.....a steady flow of funds.

How does he manage to pay his bills ?

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BitTorrent Behind the Scenes with isoHunt & BTjunkie Discussion under P2P, part of the Software Zone category on TechEnclave; In this ‘behind the scenes’ series we will try to uncover some of the mystery that surrounds BitTorrent sites and ...