Downloading FreeBSD

[nbco]

On Tuesday 05 October 2004 17:08, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> 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

> 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"?

snip
> 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.

Bittorrent is a type of p2p protocol: http://bittorrent.com/introduction.html 
Bittorrent would take the pressure off the servers as those who use it would 
effectively be getting the isos from those that already have them on their 
own boxes, in short it cuts the servers out of the picture therefore reducing 
congestion.  It's in ports. I use: /usr/ports/net/py-bittornado
home page: http://bittornado.com/

When you seed a torrent, you make your file, whether it is an iso, text etc 
available to the bittorrent community. Most bittorrent clients will do this 
for you.  If you do not seed a torrent. it will not be available to the 
bittorrent comunity even though the isos are on your machine. Other p2p 
networks don't require this tagging and so any files that you wish to share 
are available to the p2p users.

The reduction in pressure on the servers would hold true for any of the p2p 
networks I have the 5.2.1. isos on my box, and accessible to the peer 
networks, but as yet have never noticed anyone downloading them.

Once I move to 5.3 I could seed it and we can see whether it is picked up. I 
don't think there is any real reason to seed 5.2.1.
.nbco