BitTorrent Guide

An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent is the new latest/greatest P2P app to come and one of the MP3 rags has published a guide to it. Shareaza has already started to implement support for it, though support is in the early stages. The ruling is blazing fast downloads, but the difficulty of finding .tor files and other issues shows it is still a work in progress with strong niche potential. Information to host files on BT can be found here." It remains to be seen if Bit Torrent can outlive P2Ps bad rep since it is a really useful application.

Comments

Re:My issue with bittorrent

[RonnyJ]

Now, my issue is.. why can't I easily help serve that file again?

You can, just open the torrent file again, and try to save the file to the same location you did before. It'll then check the file is OK and continue serving it for others.

Re:short term - new clients are too configurable

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, if you lower your upload rate you will also download slower. There seems to have been quite some thought put into the design of the BitTorrent protocol.

Some great bittorrent sites

[dr ttol]

For the slashdot crowd, http://f.scarywater.net is for them.

For everything else, http://www.torrentse.cx, which has a comment system for each torrent file so people can post up their thoughts. Also they allow people to upload their own torrents. This site has the following sections: Misc, Movies, TV, Music, Porn, Books, Games, Software, Comics, and Anime.

Also, http://www.suprnova.org is good too, but has been having a lot of problems lately. They have: Games, Movies, TV Shows, Music, Apps, Misc, and DVD

http://www.bitetorrent.com has TV Shows, Movies, Music, Apps, Games, Comics, Anime and Misc. Allows people to upload their own torrent and has a tracker as well.

http://torrents.slash0.org/ also includes TV Shows, Movies, Games, and a Misc section.

The following are the best TV-only BitTorrent sites. http://www.marksailes.uklinux.net/bt/ http://www.tvtorrents.com

Anyways, those are the most popular BitTorrent places. And with me posting this now (and perhaps getting modded up =D), they should be even better and faster (if the website doesn't die from the load first).

Java Bit Torrent

[deblau]

I'm leading development on the official Java port, here. The code was originally a line-by-line port from the original Python (3.0.2), but it's in the middle of a refactoring to take into account some of the ways Java does things differently. We plan to match release numbers with the original Python codebase. Once we get the code cleaned up, we'll make a 3.0.2 release, and add features to get ourselves up to the current Python. The code is currently in CVS, directions available on SourceForge. We're always looking for developers and testers, of course. If you have any questions, email me directly, my SF username is flickboy. More general comments can go to the boards. We're in the process of getting our own web page up, so cut us a little slack.

I've heard complaints about and requests for "advanced" features, on the mailing lists, on IRC, and of course here. As far as the P2P protocol is concerned, I trust Bram's judgment. There are no plans to include any advanced features like upload bandwidth throttling. Instead, what I'm hoping will differentiate the Java port will be the GUI and ease-of-use, the ability of testers familiar with Java (leading to great security and QA), and code cleanliness.

If you're at all interested in seeing a (mostly) working Java implementation, and the only feature-for-feature 'official' version, check out JTorrent, and drop me a line. If you're curious about other language ports, or other ports with different goals, check out the "btports" Yahoo group. For general questions, or questions about the original Python, use the "bittorrent" Yahoo group, or go to #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net.

rsync can resume BitTorrent downloads

[Brian Ristuccia]

BitTorrent creates a sparse output file and then populates it with data in a quasi-random order. You can't resume these files with software that assumes that all data up to the end of file mark has been populated, but you can resume with any rsync or any other program program which supports differential file transfers. Rsync will checksum the blocks with missing data, determine that those blocks don't match the remote file, and transfer only those blocks.

Obligatory FAQ posting...

[oobar]

The BitTorrent FAQ and Guide site is rapidly becoming the main collection point for all information BitTorrent. If you have questions or curiosities, check it out.

Re: Poor Man's Akamai� Yeah, okay�

[VJTod]

What's difficult about publishing content on akamai?

I drop a file on my webserver and the content will be automatically published to a server geographically local to whomever accesses the content. I publish my content directly to my website as I always have. I never publish the content anywhere else.

I don't need to configure individual files to be available through bittorrent.

Clients accessing my content don't need a plugin.

BT & Ak both work well even if my ISP doesn't have a hub running akamai.

If it is in any way a replacement for Akamai - why is BT's website just text? (maybe because you can't bittorrent content like you can akamize content)

Is BitTorrent is a poor man's Akamai?
Hardly.

Besides - bittorrent is just files. Akamai has several different types of services most related to distributed content distribution. From individual files to whole websites can be hosted on the Akamai network. [nba.com] is completely hosted on the akamai network - requests to nba.com rarely ever hit the core servers.