BitTorrent official access?

[Barry Bouwsma]

Long ago, on Wed, 12 Jan 2005 15:06:41 -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> > On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 04:12:33PM +0100, Barry Bouwsma wrote:
> > > Are there plans to officially make FreeBSD releases available via
> > > BitTorrent, comparable to the way NetBSD lists it as an access method?

> Given that the torrent links were included in the 5.3 release
> announcements, that's seems pretty official to me :-)

Heh, serves me right for not paying attention to any of the announcements.
I stand humiliated.  On the other hand, people like me who ignore any
announcements and go straight to the Where To Get page know absolutely
nothing.  I guess I'm saying that once it does become official and all
that, there should be a permanent mention on the website, if it's not
planned already.


Anyhows, two questions:

First, is the torrents.freebsd.org machine down (for about a week or so),
or am I blocked from reaching it 'cuz I kept having kernel panics and
could not be a reliable seed site?

Second,

While the 4.11 demand was not terribly overwhelming, and I'm actually
a bit surprised how there's been a constant demand for 5.3 after all
this time, might it be possible to announce in this list (or wherever
appropriate) when the .torrent files are available, ahead of the
release announcement, for those of us who want to act as seeds and
have the ISO images from a nearby mirror already, in order to be all
up-to-date and ready for the announcement, so that there are more
available seed sites when the announcement does come?


And given the constant BitTorrent demand for 5.3 (i386) even without
mention apart from the announcement long ago, I wonder if mention on
the Where To Find page would result in additional access via Torrent...


A cumulative .torrent listing on the official site, I'd say -- with my
underpowered hardware I'm no match for an official mirror site, but
with storage so cheap these days, a fanatic can easily devote some gigs
to releases from long ago with occasional demand, but no need for the
infrastructure of a mirror, contributing that way.  Only bandwidth slows
me down.


thanks
barry bouwsma