I am downloading through Mullvad, which I know doesn’t let you forward your ports. So I can appreciate that that seeder’s settings and mine might not be super compatible.

Are there any other peers in that torrent swarm? If it’s just you (leeching peer) and the lone seed (seeding peer), and neither of you have ports open, then you won’t be able to download any torrent data.

If there is another peer in that swarm, or another peer joins later, and that new peer happens to be fully connectable (port forwarded) then you’ll be able to download the torrent data through them. If this is your situation then all you can do is try your luck and wait for another peer to come by.

Or if we rule all of that out - it’s possible that lone peer just has a very busy torrent client. They could be the lone peer on tons of other torrents so it would take quite a while before their torrent client gets around to sending you torrent data. If this is the case then it’s the same as above, just have to continue waiting.

Strange, they don’t even have support via IRC or similar? Most trackers handle support that way but I’m not sure how this one is doing things.

Hopefully a member there will see your post and maybe send you those details.

Time to update https://endof10.org/ , LOL.

Annoying for the IT peeps that have to deal with this. Guess they’ll have to decide whether it’s worth continuing using the hardware with a replacement OS (Linux, ChromeOS, etc.) or more likely retire all the old hardware.

Anyone in the know on how many Windows 11 SE devices were actually in use? Seems most schools would have gone the more obvious route with something like ChromeOS for a “web first” experience unless M$ and vendors were pushing these things out at massive discounts in the first place.

Not automatic (I think) and a bit clunky but the Strawberry music player does have a transcode feature so you could select music files and transcode them a certain way output to another folder. It’s not something I ever do but I did a quick test to a USB drive and it seems to work okay. It’s an option if you opt to use a gui to click through.

OTOH if you’re happy using the terminal and/or scripting then ffmpeg would be a better bet.

PS - Strawberry does have a panel where it lists “Devices” and maybe your phone could show up there and the transcoding would work a bit more automatically, wasn’t able to test that here.

VS HDD seems a bit unlikely. The typical cheap optical media isn’t designed or meant for long term archival. There are more expensive types that are meant for long term storage but I’m pretty sure that’s not what OP is talking about, especially if it’s just random blank discs from thrift stores, etc.

But to your point even cheap optical media might outlast SSDs since those tend to lose their saved data if stored unpowered for x years.

Do you mean old like DOS old, or you meant something like old Windows game?

If it’s something like an old DOS game I’d maybe try DOSBox… maybe there’s something better but that’d be on the list of things to try.

EDIT: FreeDOS also exists, should be able to run that in an emulator / virtual machine and then load anything DOS compatible into it. There’s a list of emulators / virtual machines they recommend in their download page https://freedos.org/

Not overly active but there are a few communities you could join if you like

!OpenSignups@lemmy.dbzer0.com

!Opensignups@lemmy.ml

!Opensignups@noworriesto.day

https://opentrackers.org/ is also a good site to keep an eye on (though it seems to be less active at the moment).

Your post title is a bit misleading, I think you’re talking more about trying to speed up the process of finding nodes/peers?

All torrent clients including qBittorrent already have a built-in method of finding new DHT nodes and will find new nodes automatically. If the torrent client does not have any DHT nodes to contact yet (e.g. it’s the first run and hasn’t already compiled its own list of recent DHT node IP addresses) then what it does is reach out to DHT bootstrap node servers. Torrent clients usually have that coded in, sometimes you can change them - in qBittorrent you can go to Tools/Options/Advanced, under DHT Bootstrap Nodes you’ll see the current list of well known bootstrap nodes that qBittorrent uses by default

dht.libtorrent.org:25401, dht.transmissionbt.com:6881, router.bittorrent.com:6881, router.utorrent.com:6881, dht.aelitis.com:6881

I think most/all torrent clients use the same ones.

Not sure how current this one is, the code to compile and run your own DHT bootstrap node server is on Github

https://github.com/bittorrent/bootstrap-dht

Back in 2016 Libtorrent launched its own bootstrap node server, it’s now one of the default bootstrap node servers for most/all torrent clients.

https://blog.libtorrent.org/2016/09/dht-bootstrap-node