Hello, I am trying to set up my own private torrent without using a tracker, so that it is truly private.

Tixati supports manually adding peers by manually entering their IP addresses, so I thought all I would need to do is create a private torrent, give that .torrent file to everyone I want to share with, and then manually add them as peers by manually entering their IP addresses, and it should connect to them and start working as usual.

However I cannot get it to work - after I manually add a peer, all that comes up in the peers tab is the port number of the peer, not its IP address, and it can't connect.

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like: https://i.ibb.co/NpRRGXJ/Untitled-1.png

Is this a bug?  Why does the IP address not show?  Is that why it can't connect - because the peer never got added correctly and all it has is the port number?

If I make the torrent public and enable DHT then it works, but then I get a bunch of random bots connecting which I'm obviously trying to avoid for privacy reasons.

Basically I'm trying to use Tixati as an alternative to Syncthing because Syncthing doesn't support selective transfer (where you can pick and choose which files you want to download).  Nor does it support file allocation options like Tixati's full prewrite / fast allocate / sparse, which are needed when sharing very large libraries of files to users with less free disk space than the library.

Thanks

Oh, I just saw you have made FOPNU, and that looks like it would be better suited for the job.  

However I'm still interested in getting Tixati to work as it seems like it should theoretically work so I'm still curious to solve it rather than just saying "oh well it doesn't work" and giving up.

This is not an official answer, but the lack of IP address implies that it's trying to loopback - connect to your own PC aka 127.0.0.1 aka localhost. When you add the IP address, are you sure you're adding the remote IP, not your own?

You're using 3.11, I think 3.12 had some fixes regarding manually added peers, I recall having that issue back then.

https://www.tixati.com/news/#:~:text=fixed%20problems%20when%20manually%20adding%20peers%20from%20transfer%20options%20tab%20in%20peers%20section

Also, Embedded tracker has been a longtime request by some users, but so far nothing.

Thanks guys, you were both right - for testing purposes the peer I was connecting to was another device with the same public IP address, and after upgrading to the latest version (3.24) it now works perfectly and doesn't treat it as a loopback.   Super!