Bittorent distribution

[second exodous]

I'm surprised torrents haven't replaced a lot more downloads on the net. The creator envisioned things like this, not so much the illegal stuff. I know the torrent protocol is a lot more powerful than what people use if for now, i.e. a torrent can be updated and everyone that has the torrent will see it upgraded, but no one uses those features in the protocol.


But it all boils down to how much bandwidth the OP team has. If they have a lot then it isn't really necessary, but if it is expensive for them then torrent would be a good way to go for them. Also, it is rare for me to find a download that is as fast as torrents get, I can max out my download speed with a torrent where I have yet to find a site that maxes me out.

 

[milkshake]

dunno if you have ever tried usenet but that maxes my bandwidth all the time (even on my dads 20mbs vigin media connection) not just some of the time my usenet provider is giganews, you have to pay for access but there are over 700 days binary retention with them and ssl connections.

 

[Prometheus]

I'm not surprised in the slightest - you can download stuff in the normal fashion without any extra setup steps required. (Personally, if I see a torrent, I just don't bother - too much hassle and inconvenience for me. I suspect it's possible that I'm not alone in that.)

 

[Yannick]

The creator envisioned things like this ....

RSS feeds that update torrents are the next sliced bread


@Prometheus, I don't want to offend you, but i might...


You should have a talk with my parents, about how scary installers are :blink:

 

[Prometheus]

I'm sorry. I don't believe I understand what you're getting at.

 

[Yannick]

I'm sorry. I don't believe I understand what you're getting at.

lol

 

[Prometheus]

I'm not accustomed to installers, I'm afraid (I'm pretty sure package management doesn't fall under the typical person's usage of the term "installer"), so you'll have to explain yourself far better than "lol".

 

[Yannick]

I'm not accustomed to installers, I'm afraid (I'm pretty sure package management doesn't fall under the typical person's usage of the term "installer"), so you'll have to explain yourself far better than "lol".

wait,what. we are serious?


what do you mean with extra hassle and setup for torrents?


Install client app


click link,


choose file location


wait for download


what is the difference with a http download?


I don't actually care, this has nothing to do with my original post


I just wanted to seed the idea of sharing craigs SD card over bittorent (see what i did there )


I think i succeeded in that

 

[Prometheus]

Well, if you don't mind me responding, I will.


Problem number one: Installing a client app. Why should I need to do this when I can just click a link and download?


Problem number two: Likely having to tweak my firewall and other stuff, if my understanding of this is correct.


Problem number three: Dealing with bizarre terms like "seeding" and all that other stuff that I frankly just don't care about.


I'm old-fashioned, I suppose. I tend to prefer to stick with what's long proven to be reliable - I see no need to fix what's not broken with my setup.


Anyway, more on-topic, I think it's a good idea, although perhaps you should be shot for that dire pun. I'm just not sure it'll benefit all newcomers with that method, though...

 

[Yannick]

ah, i knew you would bring up problem 1, that's why i dragged my parents into this but you did install a browser? it's a client app as well (lets say yes because you are obviously browsing this site)


this comes back to browser makers supporting popular protocols/standards (kudos to opera, they support bittorent)


feel free to ignore problem 3, torrent popularity makes this a non issue


depending on how much your isp is cheating you problem 2 is irrelevant


modern clients don't even need the centralized trackers anymore


several tens of millions of users made the software much more friendly.

 

[Prometheus]

Good to know it's friendly. Still, I'm afraid I forgot to mention problem four, though... There's zero speed benefit for a connection like mine (which, by and large, is actually perfect for almost everything).


A relative who shares my connection had to download an update for something or other, which used a BitTorrent-derived system for issuing patches. It took something like a week and a half to get about a GB of data, and meant that nobody else could use the connection for anything useful during the times it was in progress. By comparison, when I purchased FreeSpace 2 from GOG.com, about the same amount of data took about six hours, instead, and whilst it slowed down web browsing a fair bit, it didn't outright prevent it completely.

 

[second exodous]

I still feel that a package manager would be leaps and bounds ahead in terms of being modern than an 'installer' would be. BitTorrent would just replace the repositories, where you get the actual software, the package manager would handle what it does with what it gets from the BitTorrent. Package managers just make things easy, think of how difficult it was to install things on Linux before package managers.


So, whatever the package manager is, browser based or a separate program, it will take care of the BitTorrenting. It would be cool to be the first community/project to really leverage BitTorrent to it's full potential but it is sorta re-inventing the wheel.


BitTorrent's main advantage, or at least what I saw, was a completely decentralized method of distribution that would lower costs for the creator and couldn't be shut down by an oppressive power and could live on as long as there are people that feel the need for the content to exist, they would simply just need to seed. A repository like this has never been done and like I said before if the Pandora community did it first it would be all the more revolutionary.

 

[socket]

I am 100% behind this idea. I seed a handful of legal torrents for seriously like years at a time. I would be happy to use my bandwidth for something like this.

 

[Yannick]

my connection is more like this


local ubuntu mirror (940kb/s) > torrents (900kb/s) > http (varies between 500 and 800 kb/s)


that mirror doesn't count, my provider intercepts that and reroutes to their own servers


so i do need torrents to max my line


EDIT: it's usually the upload traffic that disturbes surfing, especially on *DSL lines


but most modern clients would throttle themselves to lessen the impact when they detect it

 

[second exodous]

Well, speed is not the only thing, it is important to remember that torrents never go down as long as there are seeders. Another thing to remember is it would be cheaper to host also, not sure what the OP team is looking at for costs right now with only 4,000 potential customers.


I think if done correctly the package manager could be the store front and the repository just replaced with BitTorrent. The end user would not even need to do anything special, it would just work.

 

[Yannick]

Well, speed is not the only thing, it is important to remember that torrents never go down as long as there are seeders. Another thing to remember is it would be cheaper to host also, not sure what the OP team is looking at for costs right now with only 4,000 potential customers.


I think if done correctly the package manager could be the store front and the repository just replaced with BitTorrent. The end user would not even need to do anything special, it would just work.

something like this then?


http://sianka.free.fr/

 

[lulzfish]

I'm surprised torrents haven't replaced a lot more downloads on the net.

Me too, but I think I can explain it through my own experiences as a person who uses the Internet and has an Apache server that does nothing special:


1. I have no idea how torrents are served. I know at one point I get a .torrent file through HTTP, then magic occurs and I end up with videos and music. Therefore, I have no idea how to set up my own server to serve torrents.


2. Torrents require a separate program to download, and they become files, not browser tabs. They're like PDFs. It takes a great deal of effort to open them, and they act all separate from the rest of the browser session.


So for anything less than a media file, an ISO, or something illegal, torrents are too many clicks for most users.


I'm going to look into Point #1. And also magnet links. Freaking miracles.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

Torrents are useful for large collections of things that tons of people are interested in. If you've got a 20GB torrent containing several thousand high-resolution photos of dog rectum, your download will slow to a crawl. If you've got some pirated pre-release of the newest game, it'll be the fastest download you've ever completed. However, I do remember there being code out there to seed from an HTTP server, rather than just a normal bittorrent client. Also, I use bittornado, which is fairly simple and doesn't give you a billion tabs and swarm views in 3D and all sorts of nonsense like that. a download window with the ability to control your upload speed and number of upload slots, with a pause and cancel button.

 

[Aninhumer]

Me too, but I think I can explain it through my own experiences as a person who uses the Internet and has an Apache server that does nothing special:


1. I have no idea how torrents are served. I know at one point I get a .torrent file through HTTP, then magic occurs and I end up with videos and music. Therefore, I have no idea how to set up my own server to serve torrents.

It's not much more complicated than other protocols.


The client requests a list of peers from a tracker (iirc the protocol for this is similar to HTTP).


It then requests blocks of the torrent from these peers.


Some peers will also request blocks from your client.


There's a moderately complex algorithm involved in deciding which particular peers to request from and upload to, but that's just optimisation.


In order to "serve" a torrent, you just leave a torrent client running.


Most clients have a feature to create a new torrent as well.


You're recommended (but not required) to specify one or more trackers when you create a torrent.


If you don't need much control over access, you can just use one of the various public trackers (e.g. OpenBittorrent).


Some trackers also require you to send the torrent file to them to register it.


For complete control, you can run your own tracker software, which is more complicated, but not necessary.


You can also not specify a tracker and clients will use a network called DHT to find each other.


As a user that's pretty much all you need to know.


EDIT:

And also magnet links. Freaking miracles.

The link includes a hash (checksum) of the torrent file which is all the DHT network uses to identify a torrent.


Once the clients find some other peers by DHT, there's a protocol for transferring the actual torrent file.

 

[ibisum]

I like this idea a *lot* and would absolutely love to have a torrent client on my Pandora, getting the latest releases every day. I have 2x64gig SD cards in my Pandoras these days, so I'm quite set .. at least for the immediate future..