FreeBSD Torrent Server

[youshi10 at u.washington.edu]

On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, cpghost wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 05:02:02AM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> Which is exactly why I cannot understand why anyone would want to
>> use bittorrent to legitimately distribute anything.  Why use a service that
>> the RIAA is actively attacking, because such service is being used to
>> illegally distribute pirated music?
>>
>> It's called guilt by association.
>
> Nope. Bittorrent is a distribution protocol which doesn't care
> what the payload is. Just like FTP. Just like TCP, IP and UDP.
> Should we avoid IP as well, because it's being used for distributing
> illegitimate payload? Guilt by association?
>
>> for some morons based on a guilt by association reason, then on the other
>> hand turn a blind eye to the guilt by association of using a service,
>> bittorrent,
>> that is extremely heavily used for distribution of pirated software and
>> music,
>> to distribute FreeBSD.
>
> See above. What about USENET? Despite gazillions of copyvios,
> there are still valid and legitimate groups there which are
> not harmed in the least by this. Let's not fall into the
> RIAA/MPAA/IFPI/... trap here who are trying to enforce a centralized
> distribution network of many clients and as few servers as possible
> that they could strangle at will.
>
> Having said that, FreeBSD's FTP mirrors are perfectly suitable
> for the task at hand and using them is usually much faster than
> P2P anyway (esp. to all people using asymetric link with severly
> reduced upload bandwidth). A big thanks to all bandwidth donors.
>
>> Ted
>
> Regards,
> -cpghost.
>
> --
> Cordula's Web. http://www.cordula.ws/

Overall, it's just another means of distributing information. I mean, what would happen if (heaven forbid) the webserver went down due to some DDoS attack or something like that and a number of admins needed access to ISOs / sources for their OSes because there was a security issue or something else that occurred which affected a large user/server base. BT would exist to help deliver the information needed to upgrade or install packages on their servers that would not be available otherwise (at least until someone took down the tracker, then the decentralized peers, etc :D..).

It's the decentralized property of P2P which is probably the reason why obtaining binaries / sources is available via BT for FreeBSD.

I'll just use the HTTP/FTP stuff though over BT, because it works perfectly fine most of the time :).

-Garrett