Azureus

I'm sure everybody out there who use Bit Torrent is aware that being connectable is highly recommended for best speeds and the general well being of the "swarm". For the unfortunate few who aren't, connectability is where you open an incoming port on your computer thereby allowing other peers in the Bit Torrent swarm to be able to contact you. It is however only required for one of the parties (connector or connectee) to be connectable for a connection to be made.

Azureus is definitely one of the more popular torrent clients out there, and it just became a lot cooler in my eyes: I finally explored the LAN peering plug-in that it is packaged with. This is way beyond cool and accomplishes the equivalent of link bonding using torrents. So, essentially, consider the following scenario:

• You have two PCs on your local network.
• You have two Internet connections (both 1Mbps, for e.g.), one for each PC.

Following my recent adventures with Azureus, I found that Azureus was crashing on a regular basis and often not starting up at all. Running it from the command line gave me an error similar to the following:

An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine

and a lot of mumbo-jumbo following that.

This error has been reported all over the place, including at bugs.sun.com (who decided to close it.. thanks guys! :S). But no apparent solution was being provided anywhere. Azureus was definitely stable when running 1.4.2, although it wasn't exactly performing up to par. So, this was definitely a java compatibility problem.

I installed Ubuntu a few days ago and found that my client, Azureus, which had been performing well thus far on Windows (the previous OS on that box), was, all of a sudden, no longer connectable or providing extremely slow speeds. I tried playing with firewalls and what not, but finally came across the answer when I tried downloading a torrent from OiNK. The torrent failed with an error stating that my version of Java was incompatible with the version of Azureus (2.5) that I was running.