Lately I have been scrambling to get the passkey portion of the tracker working. The system is designed to keep track of users even if their IP changes. Passkey also adds a layer of security to the tracker, making it almost impossible for non-registered users to use the tracker. The way the system works each user has a passkey assigned to them. This passkey is placed in the announce url of the torrents that the user downloads, (http://example.com/announce.php?passkey=). Now when the user's client connects to the tracker we recieve their passkey and can find them rather than trying to perform a lookup by hostname. But what if somehow the user's torrent was leaked and now 3 people are downloading using that users passkey? Well the tracker checks to see how many entries are in the active users table that have the same passkey, but different peer ids (the peer id is a unique identifier created by the client. Should that number be greater than 0 the system makes a note and notifies the user that their passkey has been leaked and that they need to reset it and re-download any torrents they have running. By re-downloading the torrents their new passkey is placed in the announce url and they can continue using the tracker. Most of this system is in place the only thing that has not been implemented is a way for the user to reset their passkey. The tracker has come a long way and I am looking forward toadding more features and functionality in the future.
~Chris