after a bit more research, i moved over to mutella. I almost gave up on that until i realized i should be using an unstable version from debian rather than their stable version of 0.3.3. i have successfully set it up and shared the files (using a friend to test downloading the file, even through routers, yes, plural, he had one on his end too...)

the version i ended up using was 0.4.3-2

it appears to work fairly well, although seems to have a couple issues with maintaining connection speed. it seems to bounce around between full bandwidth (adsl, 50KBps upload) and nothing, but averaging maybe 30KBps