brickfrog

Easier with the model # of the Thinkpad so people can look up the specs, but working off what you posted and the pics..

and one 2.5" SSD/HDD slot

Have you tried plugging in the 2.5" SSD there & then boot into the BIOS to see what it detects? (your 3rd pic, the slot on the right looks like it could take a 2.5" SATA drive) Carefully... just as a test run - Like the other comment said there isn't a drive cage or anything there so you couldn't really run it with a 2.5" drive full-time until you can rig up something to mount it properly.

This particular Thinkpad may have only been set up for M2 drives so getting a 2.5" drive working there could be tricky, I'd just get a compatible M2 drive to install in there since you know for sure that's what the Thinkpad was configured to work with previously.

That's a tough one, if these are public torrents you may be stuck having to search for the torrents one-by-one and hope you can find their associated .torrent files to re-seed the torrents.

You do need a .torrent file, or bare minimum a magnet link to an active/non-dead swarm, to be able to re-seed torrents with existing data. Magnet links without any current peers on them are a bit useless for this task unfortunately.

If these torrents are from private trackers you can check the private tracker website(s), many of them have a feature to allow you to re-download all the .torrent files you previously downloaded from the tracker.

I also started becoming paranoid, whether someone was collecting my data and offering them to “the highest bidder”

Debrid services do collect data, the recent RealDebrid drama seems relevant since this app is basically for use with those services

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/32433831

It actually seems more private to self host Jellyfin to stream/playback already downloaded media files but that's just my own interpretation.

Definitely I could see this being useful for discussing things that would traditionally be censored on other more centralized or semi-decentralized platforms (piracy, anti-authoritarian discussions in an oppressive country, etc).

IPFS by default isn't set up to work around censorship or anything of the sort. Protocol Labs (creator/maintainer of IPFS and Filecoin) have always honored copyright takedowns, etc. on their own infrastructure and have done a fair amount of work on content blocking within the default IPFS clients and such.

e.g. https://blog.ipfs.tech/2023-content-blocking-for-the-ipfs-stack

I tend to look towards full blu-ray/remuxes/flac that sort of thing, private trackers are more suited towards that with both p2p groups as well as the general scene groups.

Public torrents work well enough but the release groups that cater to public torrent indexers tend to be in a race to the smallest file possible. Hence you see a ton of "4K" uploads that are tiny for download but are crap for playback beyond a phone screen. Even yify himself knew he wasn't aiming for quality encodes. But generally speaking there will always be people looking for those type of uploads and public torrents do cater towards that.

sata is not supported. let alone ssds. do you know even the slightest thing about hardware???

It's just a guess, you never did tell us what specific model Asus you have there.

Not that you're curious but the model I have here is a Asus F8S which seems to be closer to 2008 era e.g. https://www.newegg.com/black-asus-f8-series-f8sn-d1/p/N82E16834220331?srsltid=AfmBOorI8VyoX35T6xRUD0e-Mbg1Q6IFui9Xgy6RlsB2sLLhfuFvIePr

In 2008 laptops did have SATA connections. I have in fact plugged in SATA SSDs into old laptops and desktops from that era and earlier. I doubt 3 years is too much difference but again, no idea on the specific hardware you're looking at so maybe your specific laptop is one of the last generation that was ATA only, not SATA (?)

Also, 4gb ram back then was a lot, like 64 gb today

Yes granted 3 years earlier 4GB would have cost more for sure. 1GB RAM is the bare minimum for Windows 7 Home 32-bit so I guess this thing you have was already at the bare minimum.

The rest of my comment still stands, it will work perfectly fine as a Linux server with CLI only though that's not quite the answer you want.

1.73 ghz Intel Celeron M

EDIT: The CPU you've got is 64-bit capable I believe https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/29733/intel-celeron-m-processor-530-1m-cache-1-73-ghz-533-mhz-fsb-socket-m/specifications.html

So the laptop should have been spec'd for 2GB RAM minimum normally. Thinking you're not reading the full RAM correctly e.g. if in Windows maybe run CPU-Z or similar to actually see what the full RAM and individual RAM sticks claim to have.

40 gb old hard drive that is suprisingly healthy (96℅ according to HDDsentinel, more than 1000 days left)

Healthy yes, but if you end up using this daily you'll want to consider swapping in a SATA SSD into it and at least gain some sort of speed.

1.25 gb of terribly slow RAM

Yeah that's low. Is that correct, no corrupt RAM sticks or anything like that to throw the number off?

Do you definitely need Linux with a GUI/desktop environment? I'd expect any flavor of Linux server minus GUI would work fine. Think of it as a little server you spin up and run a few programs maybe for your network or some other hobby.

PS - I think I have a Asus laptop from that era and it had 4GB RAM default, can't tell if yours was just spec'd badly since first purchased.

In its early days IPFS was being pushed as a anti-censorship tool, obviously blocklists/denylists is the opposite of that. But it's all a moot point, you're linking to a discussion from 2015. AFAIK denylists were already implemented e.g. https://blog.ipfs.tech/2023-content-blocking-for-the-ipfs-stack/

That client still does not support DHT via I2P correct? That's what their github page says

https://github.com/majestrate/XD

I haven't bothered trying it since it lacks DHT. For torrenting I2P with DHT I guess people are mainly going to use I2PSnark. (BiglyBT has limited support for I2P DHT but it is clunky and not very usable)

For torrenting I2P without DHT qBittorrent is working well, granted it is still quite new to the I2P scene.

Officially it should work, but I couldn’t get any peers.

Officially it won't work. It's impossible for qBittorrent to support DHT via I2P when Libtorrent itself does not support it. qBittorrent along with many other torrent clients are based on Libtorrent.

https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/7408

qBittorrent works well enough as long as you're adding I2P trackers to public torrents you want to find I2P peers with. It's not great but for now that may be the best solution aside from using I2PSnark (which like you said isn't that great).

qBittorrent won't attempt to find any I2P peers unless you add I2P trackers to the torrents. After that it's hit or miss similar to public torrents.

These are working public trackers in I2P that I know of:

http://w7tpbzncbcocrqtwwm3nezhnnsw4ozadvi2hmvzdhrqzfxfum7wa.b32.i2p/a

http://opentracker.skank.i2p/a

http://opentracker.r4sas.i2p/a

http://opentracker.dg2.i2p/a

This tracker is also in I2P but it only tracks torrents registered at their site:

http://tracker2.postman.i2p/announce.php

only i2psnark, but i2psnark is an awful client.

Agreed. On the upside it's been around much longer for torrenting within I2P so I suspect a lot of I2P users just have that set up for torrenting purposes and that's how it's been for years.

It's not how I normally torrent but it does seem to work okay. I've been experimenting with cross-seeding public torrents into I2P via qBittorrent 5.x (just using I2P, not torrenting publicly / no mixed mode / no need for VPN).

I've only picked up a few peers needing torrents I cross seed that way but otherwise does seem to work. Mainly the test torrents seem to get more hits e.g. seeding Ubuntu Linux ISOs so other people can test their torrent I2P setups.

I will add that currently I2P torrenting is a bit limited since Libtorrent itself does not support DHT via I2P so torrent clients like qBittorrent won't either. You always need to add I2P trackers to your torrents if you intend to torrent within I2P using qBittorrent or any Libtorrent based client.

The only torrent client that has the ability to torrent via DHT on I2P is I2P's own built-in torrent client (i2psnark) but that client has a lot of its own limitations, it's hard to use it as a primary torrent client.