Downloading FreeBSD

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-10-05 10:04, Troy Mills <troymills at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 16:52:06 +0300, Giorgos Keramidas
> <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
> > On 2004-10-05 21:06, Marcus Meng <aenslad.mackenzie at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Has anyone ever considered setting up a bittorrent tracker for FreeBSD
> > > distributions?
> >
> > The usual methods (FTP, CVS, CVSup) work fine so far.  What would that
> > gain for the end-user who's sitting on a slow dialup link somewhere?

> The "gain" for dialup users would be indirect but ultimately everyone
> would benefit. Those who chose to do CVSup and download ISOs from the
> FTP server may see an indirect gain in speed as the bandwidth load
> (from those downloading ISO's) would distributed to the people who
> wish to help seed the torrent. It would obviously be a bigger help
> around the time when new versions come out and the servers are being
> hammered.

Please don't use top-posting :-/
Especially when part of the thread is already using bottom-posting.

I'm asking because I don't know:

a) What a bittorrent tracker is.
b) What it takes to install and set up one.
c) Why would I prefer it over FTP/CVSup?

Your reply to c) seems to be "to save bandwidth".  The next logical
question is "how is bandwidth saved and who is it saved from"?

> I'm not sure if that explanation was clear or not but it seems obvious
> to me what the bonuses would be.

Not very, but I've seen BitTorrent being mentioned quite a few times in
the past.  I'm asking what it is, why one would use it, how it would be
set up in order to learn more about BitTorrent.