Tracker

General Overview

Project admin overview

The Tracker software is the center-pivot of Archiveteam's distributed archiving efforts. It hands out items to be downloaded and keeps track of what is completed. Items can be usernames, subdomains, full URLs, basically any unit we can use to break the site into manageable chunks. The progress of each project can be viewed via the leaderboard interface on https://tracker.archiveteam.org.

A custom (but unofficial) userscript, which can be installed using Tampermonkey or other userscript managers, can be used to replace the tracker leaderboard JS to enable the display of additional information including b/s and i/s values as well as time estimates.

A leaderboard

The Warrior is the yang to the Tracker's yin. The warriors get the list of current projects from the project file on https://warriorhq.archiveteam.org/.

API

This is a sample project snippet from the projects.json file (line breaks included for readability):

{
    "name": "streetfiles",
    "title": "Streetfiles",
    "description": "Streetfiles is closing April, 30th, 2013.",
    "repository": "https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/streetfiles-grab.git",
    "logo": "http://archiveteam.org/images/7/7b/Streetfiles-logo.png",
    "marker_html": 
        "<a href='http://tracker.archiveteam.org/streetfiles/'>
        <img src='http://archiveteam.org/images/7/7b/Streetfiles-logo.png'
        alt='Streetfiles' width='235' height='50' /></a>",
    "deadline": "2013-04-30T23:59:59Z",
    "host": "streetfiles.org",
    "leaderboard": "http://tracker.archiveteam.org/streetfiles/",
    "lat_lng": [
        51,
        9
    ]
},

It shows where to get the grab code and other project information.

Here is an example root of the file:

{
    "auto_project": "projectslug",
    "broadcast_message": "<p>This message is shown only 
        in the warrior VM web UI at time of writing.</p>",
    "tracker_banner_html": "This is shown on the tracker 
        front page. <em>Wow!</em>",
    "warrior": {"seesaw_version":"0.7.0"},
    "projects": [],
}

Hardware

In 2013-20??, the tracker ran on a Linode instance operated by chronomex. In 20??-present day (2023), the tracker runs on "several beefy Hetzner servers".

Monitoring

https://tracker.archiveteam.org had a Munin instance located at http://zeppelin.xrtc.net/corp.xrtc.net/shilling.corp.xrtc.net/.

Software used:

• Universal Tracker is a Ruby HTTP application that sends and receives JSON payloads and uses Redis for the data store.
• Redis A memory-based key-value store
• Debian is the Linux distribution the stack is built upon.
• warrior-hq a small Sinatra web app to manage the Warriors and display the geo-location world map.

You can also set up your own tracker.

People

In case of a tracker maintenance emergency, please contact these active users (as of 2014-08-29). Tracker emergencies only!:

• chfoo
• arkiver

History

This history is both incomplete (it stops in early 2012) and probably wrong in areas.

Originally, ArchiveTeam coordinated large projects through the wiki, keeping tables of (the analogues of what are called in tracker terminology) items and letting people claim them and update their progress by editing the wiki.Midway through the Google Video project, in April 2011, Underscor created a system called "Listerine" that did this automatically (a client for the Listerine protocol can be found here.) This remained an attractive concept (and the name "tracker" seems to have originated during a wistful discussion about this), and later in the year, Alard, the de facto project lead/resident enthusiast of MobileMe, wanted Underscor to set up another Listerine instance for it. Apparently this never happened, since a few weeks later Alard wrote his own system, which had something resembling the current tracker protocol. A few months later, this was replaced by a shell script called "Seesaw", which added automatic uploading with Rsync