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BitTorrent for Content Providers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-it's-per-se-bad-don't-you-realize dept.

snuvlorgin writes "ibiblio.org has entered the fray, launching an enhanced BitTorrent site. Among the torrent offerings (all legal) are Linux kernels, distros, Project Gutenberg texts, and the ibiblio Speaker Series, which includes videos of talks by Larry Lessig, Robin Miller, and Dan Gillmor. ibiblio developed and open sourced the Osprey and Permaseed software to make BitTorrent seeding reliable, persistent, and suitable for large-scale content providers. Yes, you can find these torrents later."

100 comments

  1. Great Idea for alternative content by Thanatopsis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Great idea. It legitimizes BitTorrent as a protocol and it makes find some great content easy. Torrents On!

    --

    Thalasar
    1. Re:Great Idea for alternative content by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know there should be at least some legal bittorents to justify the application so I can really just use it to pirate movies and music.

    2. Re:Great Idea for alternative content by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Great idea. It legitimizes BitTorrent as a protocol and it makes find some great content easy. Torrents On!

      BitTorrent is one of those protocols like FTP and IRC's DCC that annoys the hell out of me. A file transfer protocol should not require me to setup my firewall to allow inbound data connections initiated from a server or another client to get decent transfer rates. Unless the protocol has changed, your downloads won't go much more about 10kbps unless you forward a group of ports from the outside client to your internal workstation.

      Why can't these people design a protocol more like HTTP? Both the data and control packets can go out over a single TCP port and it's very easy to proxy.

    3. Re:Great Idea for alternative content by bhtooefr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Because that would require more centralization, which is a Bad Idea(tm) when you're trying to mitigate the load. You have to have a port open to accept incoming connections directly.

    4. Re:Great Idea for alternative content by kwark · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Why can't these people design a protocol more like HTTP? Both the data and control packets can go out over a single TCP port and it's very easy to proxy.
      You did read the protocol? Since this is exactly how peers communicate!
      The problem your transfers are slow is because you can't connect to enough peers (which can be fixed by either party by being connectable by either unblocking or forwarding a port).
    5. Re:Great Idea for alternative content by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Great idea. It legitimizes BitTorrent as a protocol and it makes find some great content easy. Torrents On!

      Me too! and I hope they post the new Harry Potter book, I've been looking everywhere for it!

  2. Let's see. by Poromenos1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp. The downside is that you have to have a client, but I bet that browsers will have integrated BT support soon (the new Opera does, FF has a plugin). And the savings for the server range from a LOT to none, and even none can't hurt, since if nothing else you at least have a great download client able to resume downloads, download huge files, etc.

    --
    Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    1. Re:Let's see. by LastAndroid · · Score: 1

      In addition it is good with load balancing, so you don't have the problem of lots of people using one server and another not being used.

    2. Re:Let's see. by Poromenos1 · · Score: 2, Informative

      And the tracker has great stats for everything, from downloads to bytes transferred between peers.

      --
      Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
    3. Re:Let's see. by Grym · · Score: 1

      The downside is that you have to have a client, but I bet that browsers will have integrated BT support soon (the new Opera does, FF has a plugin).

      You know what I'd like to see? A protocol that, in cases of low load, performs similar to modern FTP/HTTP implementations (pause/resume, multi-sourcing, etc.) but switches seamlessly a swarming model when a certain threshold is met.

      Maybe BitTorrent already does this, but it doesn't feel that way. When just starting a rare file (or even trying a popular file after the rush to get it), BT is so slow. It feels like my dial-up days all over again.

      -Grym

    4. Re:Let's see. by aywwts4 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Shut your face, as someone who is actually still stuck on dialup I find your comments offensive and insensitive; you know full well on your dialup days the downloads you attempt would have taken weeks. And even try to liken it to our suffering when you see speeds in the lower half of a hundred K that might take a couple of hours. For Shame Good sir, For Shame.

      (Yeah, I'm planning on suing the government and AT&T for retributions for the hardships and suffering our modem bound people have had to endure.)


      Seriously though, the answer to the rare file dilemma is that the website that is hosting the torrents needs to have a server running Bittorent and all the files with intelligent prioritizing of the worst seeded files. So when there are other people to take the load the website can outsource it, when its rare the website will have to share the burden like it would have had to via http anyways.

      --
      Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
    5. Re:Let's see. by MindStalker · · Score: 1

      Actually I've frequently seen rare bittorrets download at less then 5K so yes, dial-up speeds.

    6. Re:Let's see. by TeknoHog · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp. The downside is that you have to have a client

      As opposed to http and ftp, which somehow magically work without a client ;)

      Seriously though, something like BT plugin in Firefox would probably help a lot.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    7. Re:Let's see. by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      I cheat. I use a Java (Jython actually) applet that acts as a client as long as my users are connected anywhere on my website. I was pouring out 150GB+ a day in bandwidth from my server so switching to distributed downloads was sort of essential for my budget.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    8. Re:Let's see. by Poromenos1 · · Score: 1

      Bah, you know I meant a client BESIDES the browser :P

      --
      Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
  3. oblig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    anyone have a DIRECT DOWNLOAD?

    toomanycapspascynamoot

  4. Too bad there aren't any fricking seeds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Tons o' torrents, 0 seeds. Wow.

    1. Re:Too bad there aren't any fricking seeds by snuvlorgin · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's not immediately obvious, but S=seeds, P=peers, and PS=permaseeds. The key is that torrents don't go seedless when there are zero regular seeds. A permaseed keeps the torrent alive.

  5. Enhanced? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Enhanced?

  6. More widespread support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Excellent, now maybe stupid Radford University will stop blocking ports 6800-6900. Seriously, BitTorrent needs all the legitimate support it can get if it is not to be grouped together with "illegitimate P2P traffic"
    --
    Fairfax Underground: Public message board for residents of Fairfax County, VA

    1. Re:More widespread support by Bri3D · · Score: 2, Informative

      You can set BT to whatever port you want, so I don't see that as a problem.

    2. Re:More widespread support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      lol whoever modded this picked the one that came second. you should apply for a job in the patent office.

    3. Re:More widespread support by uberchicken · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Surely their reason for blocking will be related to bandwidth hogging rather than p2p politics?

    4. Re:More widespread support by ClamChwdrMan · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      You're lucky they only block by port. My school (CA State Polytechnic Univ Pomona) blocks by packet content, so I can't just change the port.

      On the humorus (and annoying) side however, some part of the network infrastructure related to the scanning crashed a LOT the first year they had it running. The 'net would "blink" on and off every 5 minutes or so throughout the day. (It makes SSH'ing to your home to get some work done _impossible_.) It took them a whole year to get it fixed.

    5. Re:More widespread support by F�an�ro · · Score: 1

      That will not make much difference if everyone else still uses the default ports.
      You still need someone to connect to
      and these filters usually block the outgoing port

      You might be able to receive and reply to connection requests, but you cannot initiate connections yourself.

    6. Re:More widespread support by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 1

      I know Azureus and BitComet (And the rip-off copy BitLord) use a random port. You can set whatever port you want there, too. I'm currently using port 5555. Seeing as how Azureus and BitComet are really popular, you shouldn't have a problem finding peers.

      --
      Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
    7. Re:More widespread support by F�an�ro · · Score: 1

      they do? Interesting. I thought azureus had 6800 as default too.
      But i would guess that azureus and co are only really popular with the heavy users, probably not the people that only want to download a gutenberg book.
      ABC, torrentstorm, and the python variants of the orginal client use the standard ports afaik. Opera probably too.
      Of yourse it can be changed, but 99% of the users won't botter, and why should they, if their connection is not blocked?

    8. Re:More widespread support by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      Two words: SSH tunneling.

      Tunnel the connection to a computer outside of the firewall, and you'll have it made.

    9. Re:More widespread support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry for the AC,

      If you can ssh into your home to get work done, why don't you forward the ports through ssh to get around the block?

    10. Re:More widespread support by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 1

      If it's working, there's no reason to change your port. I can still connect to you, you can still connect to me. Unless either of us has a nazi ISP that's blocking the ports. I heard some have started blocking 'em.

      --
      Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
    11. Re:More widespread support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Two words: SSH tunneling.

      Tunnel the connection to a computer outside of the firewall, and you'll have it made.

      tunnel my superb university connection into my 150K home DSL? no gain... :-)

      bittorrent should have come with random port choosing specified directly into the protocol.

      no, actually, the tracker should have been implemented in a way that it would help peers to negotiate ports, by having active peers open listening ports on demand based on the needs of what the firewalled peers currently outgoing connection policies allow...

    12. Re:More widespread support by ClamChwdrMan · · Score: 1

      I can (and do) occasionally do that. It works great, in fact. The only problem is that my home's net connection is so slow, it's just faster to download directly on a machine at home, then upload it all at once via sftp. I was just pointing out that even though it has very legitimate uses, it's still blocked completely at some places...even places where it should be acceptable to use it.

    13. Re:More widespread support by EternityInterface · · Score: 0

      "(And the rip-off copy BitLord)"

      Not a ripoff as much as a money-making scheme, Isohunt recommends it, that it's "spyware free", but damn, what's the -ware for "has ads on the left and 2 buttons with shopping and find a chick to fuck today!"?

      --
      the sun is god
  7. I love IBiblio! by Universal+Nerd · · Score: 1

    The subject says it all really.

    A great repository of mirrors of just about everything that has ever been written and released, not to mention massive, MASSIVE, bandwidth. They are just friggin' cool - cooler than sharks with lasers on their heads!!!!1

    Thanks guys! You guys rock!

    --
    Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
    1. Re:I love IBiblio! by jmcharry · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ibiblio also hosts the streaming audio for a number of NC public and student radio stations. It is a great service, and if bittorrent can reduce a bit of its server load so it can do even more, great!

      Ibiblio is the former sunsite, and has been a major contributor to the Internet for years.

    2. Re:I love IBiblio! by Sayan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Thanks for your support! I can tell you it feels just as great working there.

      --
      resurrect my .sig
    3. Re:I love IBiblio! by metaphorever · · Score: 1

      When I look at the lists of torrents, although each torrent is identified in the category column as 'video', 'software' etc. but these categories are not links. There seems to be no way to look at all the torrents from one category, just the search and what is listed on the frontpage. That said I think that projects like IBiblo are wonderful and I'm very glad to see them adopting BT for distribution (as long as there are still ftp/http ways of getting files that may not be as popular). I just wish I could look at all the videos, or music without the other things mixed in.

      --
      If people continue to abuse this feature, I will have to remove it. - Slashdot Comment Box, 1998
    4. Re:I love IBiblio! by MrCopilot · · Score: 0
      Hey man, Nothing is cooler than sharks with lasers on their heads, nothing!

      Although they do rock I'll give ya that one.

      --
      OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
    5. Re:I love IBiblio! by phpsocialclub · · Score: 1

      I also love ibiblio,

      they host a bunch of projects for me and and always are super nice when you need changes. If you have a project that is worthy, they are more than happy to host it for you.

      go Ibiblio

  8. I can't find the pr0n :( by tacarat · · Score: 1

    Just kidding. This is a good thing. I just hope they can combine efforts with The Linux Mirror Project. It'd be a shame for either to go to the wayside, especially when keeping as many seeders as possible is vital to any BT site.

    --
    "Common sense will be the death of us all"
    1. Re:I can't find the pr0n :( by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The great thing about Osprey is that there always at least one permanent seed available.

  9. From off the starboard bow... by abscondment · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why wouldn't you just change the port you're using?

    1. Re:From off the starboard bow... by Jeremi · · Score: 2, Funny
      Why wouldn't you just change the port you're using?


      As a reasonably intelligent Slashdotter, you would. As anyone else, you would answer that question with a blank look that says: "port? What's a port? All I know is my download didn't work."

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  10. WORD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Damn straight! YOU KNOW WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT! Baby, I'll tell you, this pig flys!

  11. /.ed? by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 3, Funny

    Finally, a Slashdotting that's a good thing.

    1. Re:/.ed? by milktoastman · · Score: 1

      Why not italics? Are you not a superfan of them? I personally abhor boldface. But to each his schone, you know? I've degraded into a mere parody of sky, I know.

    2. Re:/.ed? by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 0

      I wanted strong emphasis, not just emphasis.

    3. Re:/.ed? by milktoastman · · Score: 1

      Ohhhh....

  12. Re:Peachy by Thanatopsis · · Score: 1

    Your last comment got modded down for good reason. Nothing is stopping you from putting out your own distribution/torrent/. What's the matter with you? Tons of independent content producers use bittorrent to distribute their content.

    --

    Thalasar
  13. IBiblio is pretty cool.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and is doing a great iniciative to legitimize Bittorrent... but nothing is better than sharks with lasers :D just imagine a batallion of sharks with lasers under your command muahahahahah

  14. Let's see-Poor arguments. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    " Hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp."

    The problem for clients is that your download time is dramatically increased compared to FTP/HTTP, both in speed, and in quantity.

    "And the savings for the server range from a LOT to none, and even none can't hurt, since if nothing else you at least have a great download client able to resume downloads, download huge files, etc."

    We like reinventing wheels don't we? FTP can already do that. Let's invent a new programming language while we're at it.

  15. Re:Peachy by tacarat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just in case Peachy's discouraged anyone from trying to submit their homebrew distrobution to Ibiblio.

    From Ibiblio.org
    ---------------
    Contributing to ibiblio.org
    If you are interested in becoming an ibiblio.org contributor:

          1. Read the Collection Criteria to see if your interest will be served by working with us
          2. Check out the services we offer contributors to see if we have what you need.
          3. Hint: very few, if any, proprietary services will be provided, but many open source solutions are, can or will be offered on request.
          4. Drop a note to help@ibiblio.org telling us:

            * What your project will be
            * What services you might wish to use
            * How to contact you by phone (so we can work out any details and passwords)
            * Anything else you think might be helpful
    ---------------

    One of the main things to be considered is keeping things up to date and making some sort of contribution to the public. It (should) be a given that the bigger distros will be properly maintained, as a good homebrew distro should, but a homebrew which is only a minor modification to an existing distro may not make the cut. If you've got a great modification, maybe you should see if it's more practical to distribute the modified packages instead of an entire distro.

    --
    "Common sense will be the death of us all"
  16. Re:Peachy by Sweetshark · · Score: 1

    ... while homebrew distributions will fail to qualify.
    http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/
    ..'nough said ...

  17. Bittorrent sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Bit Torrent ain't that great. Last night I went on
    to download OpenSuSE with bit torrent and was told
    that there was 9 days left to the download.
    It was downloading at around 9k and I have a 5M line.
    I decided to download the CDs using the FTP and
    had the CDs a short time after that.

    Bittorrent sucks.

    1. Re:Bittorrent sucks by IconBasedIdea · · Score: 1

      Wow. You're single bad experience has destroyed my image of BitTorrent. It clearly has to be the worst thing ever...

    2. Re:Bittorrent sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't feed the trolls, fucktard.

    3. Re:Bittorrent sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      no.

      either you suck because you cant configure a router/firewall.

      or opensuse mirrors suck.

      one or the other. i get torrents perfectly. last night i downloaded the new family guy film in under 5 hours.

  18. PLEASE PLEASE by xmorg · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I am sick to death of waiting for fileplanet/etc downloads. Or the dreaded "Sorry there are already 500 users logged into this ftp server. Im like, dude... wheres the torrent???

    1. Re:PLEASE PLEASE by imsabbel · · Score: 1

      Yeah, fileplanet is a sickness.
      I searched an utility last week. A small programm, about 300k zipped (to be exact, an extractor for some games packfiles).
      The only source i could find was fileplanet. So i bit the bullet and made an account (not the paying kind, but still very "dont like").
      Only to find out that there were x00 people before me in the row and i could expect my download to start in 68 minutes...
      Well, i tried out a blind emule search (now that i could see the exact filesize in fileplanet) and got that damn thing via the slowest filesharing program in the world before my damn queue was fininshed...

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    2. Re:PLEASE PLEASE by Kimos · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I am sick to death of waiting for fileplanet/etc downloads. Or the dreaded "Sorry there are already 500 users logged into this ftp server. Im like, dude... wheres the torrent???
      FilePlanet and others like them won't switch to torrents. If they make you wait in a queue they not only get to put ads on your screen for the entire time you wait, but they hope to get you to pay for instant member access. If the torrents could just be distributed without their strict control their business model would fail.
    3. Re:PLEASE PLEASE by aywwts4 · · Score: 1

      Here is an absolutely crazy idea; We have seen the success of illegal P2P sites get funding for servers and bandwidth and whatnot, and we know there is a great demand for game related content (Videos, Mods, Patches, Etc) Since that market is being overloaded by a not so nice company or two; Why doesn't someone make a Torrent site for all of it? People here have the know how, You don't get sued for hosting the files, etc. Its over my head, But I haven't run across anything that fills this niche yet.

      Yeah I know I just said, why doesn't someone get up and do it, with no intention of doing it myself; my perfectly reasonable excuse is I don't have the know-how or the resources (or the motivation) :D

      --
      Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
    4. Re:PLEASE PLEASE by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 1

      and we know there is a great demand for game related content (Videos, Mods, Patches, Etc) Since that market is being overloaded by a not so nice company or two; Why doesn't someone make a Torrent site for all of it?

      A great idea. You could even call it FileRush.com, for example.

      However, note that placing some game demos on torrents is a technical violation of copyright laws. Although the idea of game demos is that they are widely distributed to everyone, often the lawyers slap the same licenses on them as for every other proprietary release. Unfortunately, just because you got a download for free doesn't give you permission to distribute it to others for the same cost. Maybe it should, but it doesn't.

  19. Science Content and Torrent by kkamrani · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would like to see the scientific journals, especially The Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ start distributing their montly publications over Bit Torrent. There have been occasions of downloading their 150mb journals where there servers and bandwidth were clearly overwhelmed. It would, in my opnion, be a great front to publicize excellent and FREE scientific articles as well as popularize and legitmize bit torrent as a cost effective and fast way to distribute content.

    --
    Anthropology.net - Beyond bones and stones.
  20. lol by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I just bookmarked ibiblio in my warez folder.

  21. Much as I like... by jacksonj04 · · Score: 1

    Much as I like BitTorrent and want to see it take over all downloads (seriously), it pains me to see new BT sites when the BT protocol is banned from my prospective university network. Any helpful suggestions?

    --
    How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
    1. Re:Much as I like... by forkazoo · · Score: 2, Informative

      Find some things like:
        Clifford Lynch: Speech on Scholarly Communications

      And write a friendly note to your IT staff explaining that you seem to be having trouble getting it, apparently because the ports are blocked. Explain that it is relavent academic material that you need to consult. (Try to find something specific to your major, and with an academic title.) Whenever you run across something like this that has legitimate scholarly merit that is relevant to your courseload, write another friendly note explaining how you need access to it.

      Don't be abuse, don't be whiny, don't try to convince them you are smart or well informed. Policy is never decided by such a pissing contest. You would just be ignored. Just make polite, courteous explanations that you need legitimate access to specific resources.

      They may or may not decide that the benefits outweigh the trouble. In this case, try to find a proxy to pass through...

  22. Download time increased!? by grahamsz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My personal experiences suggest that a well seeded torrent downloads much faster than an equivilent http download.

    For whatever reason i struggle to max out my 3MB pipe from anywhere but the fastest servers, yet with bittorrent i can get damn close on most transfers.

    The biggest hinderence (that i see) to bittorrent is that you need to have a listner port open for good performance.

  23. Re:Peachy by imsabbel · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Come on please... if you want to benefit, stick you head into your ass, then she shit thats comming out of your mouths has a nice place to stay and doesnt pollute the internet.

    Or better shoot yourself and help the world be a smarter place.

    --
    HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
  24. Re:Peachy by I_redwolf · · Score: 1

    You're not making any sense. Anyone can seed a torrent. It effectively lowers the cost to distribute gigs worth of data effectively. It benefits the independent distro by allowing them the ability to compete on the same scale as the bohemoth corporation.

    No longer does the upstart need to be constrained by cost of things like bandwidth, which can get extremely expensive. Your anger is pointed in the wrong direction; torrents aren't the problem. If you hate corporations so, start a website that markets every single distro you think deserves the light of day.

    Instead of being angry, do something about it.

  25. Show your love with your wallet! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Why don't we all show our love by donating to ibiblio: https://secure.ibiblio.org/gift/
    I am sure they could do with some more quad-Opteron boxes ;)

  26. Federal government bans bittorrent by Danathar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Where I work bittorrent is classified as a Peer to Peer software in the same grouping as Kazza, Morpheus, ect....so the offical policy is that you are not allowed to use bittorrent FOR ANYTHING unless you have permission from the CIO.

    On an upside those that have broken the rules are people who were downloading LINUX distros and no action was taken.

    My point being I REALLY hope that bittorrent becomes an offical specified file transfer protocol. It might seperate it from the rest of the peer to peer crap that's tarnishing bittorrents legitimate use.

    1. Re:Federal government bans bittorrent by ndansmith · · Score: 2, Funny

      I can see it now:
      torrent://symphonyos.com/torrents/symphonyos-alp ha4-release.torrent

  27. Will this make it easier to give back? by koreth · · Score: 1
    I have a server at a hosting company that gives me up to a terabyte a month of traffic on a reasonably fast net link. Since my site normally doesn't come anywhere near that, I've taken to seeding a bunch of legal torrents (Debian and Ubuntu distros, Project Gutenberg DVD, etc. -- lots of the same stuff ibiblio is hosting.) I think of it as giving a little something back to the net at large.

    Seeding lots of torrents on a server is somewhat annoying to do in that, as far as I can tell, there's no good non-GUI tool for seeding a bunch of torrents and capping their total bandwidth usage. I've been using NX to run Azureus remotely (NX will let you disconnect from a running X client and reconnect to it later from a different X server, pretty nifty) which works but is a real memory hog and even with NX's acceleration is still sometimes kind of painful to administer because you have to navigate the remote GUI.

    The Osprey site still seems very light on technical details, but I'm hoping its Permaseed component will let me cut way down on the couple hundred megabytes of memory I'm using for my seeding, not to mention make it easier to offer up my server as a semi-permanent seed for other people's torrents.

    I look forward to checking out this new software.

    1. Re:Will this make it easier to give back? by perchr · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you want a CLI tool for seeding, you could try libTorrent. It works great, uses little memory and is free

    2. Re:Will this make it easier to give back? by toad3k · · Score: 1

      I just tried that the other day and I must agree, a very underappreciated torrent program. And improving rapidly as well.

      Even with multiple torrents downloading on my max bandwidth, it rarely uses more than 3% of my cpu.

    3. Re:Will this make it easier to give back? by koreth · · Score: 1

      Thanks! I must have missed that one when I looked around at my seeding options. Looks like just the thing.

    4. Re:Will this make it easier to give back? by jbellis · · Score: 1

      so, for someone with no BT experience --

      care to give idiotproof instructions to seed, say, debian?

    5. Re:Will this make it easier to give back? by IpalindromeI · · Score: 1

      You just fire up your favorite bittorrent client and point it at the torrent you want to seed. That's it. Just leave the client running, and it will keep seeding forever.

      --

      --
      Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
  28. Federal government is beholden to Us The People by tepples · · Score: 1

    so the offical policy is that you are not allowed to use bittorrent FOR ANYTHING unless you have permission from the CIO.

    And if the CIO flat out refuses to let you use the BitTorrent system to save money on updating federal computers, you can make a federal scandal about The Fleecing Of America and tell all the news media. We The People do what the TV tells us to do.

  29. Can't change the tracker's port as easily by tepples · · Score: 1

    Just changing the port that your program uses won't help if the torrent's tracker listens only on a port that your ISP blocks inbound and outbound. No, trackerless torrents don't work well yet because Azureus and BitTorrent clients use mutually incompatible protocols.

  30. Ibiblio Direct Download by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I believe almost all the content on http://torrent.ibiblio.org/ is available for direct download from http://www.ibiblio.org/

  31. Instead of BT as an alternative to http/ftp... by ant_tmwx · · Score: 1

    ..a hybrid might be better for independent smaller groups to distribute stuff.

    I've looked at BitTorrent and haven't found this feature, which could be of use to me and hopefully others. I've been dealing with distributing Creative Commons licensed music, and have used BT very successfully. Obviously, BT is great for saving bandwidth costs and these types of musicians don't usually have the cash to pay for tons of downloads themselves.

    This becomes a problem though if the last seed goes down (computer gets turned off etc), and there are only unfinished downloads by peers. If there were a way to specify a subsitute or alternate URL that would only be used in case of emergency when all the P2P seeds are down, it would save on bandwidth costs but also allow for a backup to turn an unfinished peer into a seeder. Then once their was a 100% seeder, the alternate URL would not need to be used, only the new seeder.

    This makes BT a bit of a P2P hybrid with plain http or ftp URLs. Instead of having a .torrent link on a page and direct download links to mp3s (or whatever), there could just be a .torrent, encouraging people to share bandwidth but there would be a backup plan if no full seeders exist. It would use P2P bandwidth when possible, but have something to fall back on.

    There could also be multiple alternate URLs, basically a listing of mirrors. Would be really helpful in my experience for artists spreading their music & hopefully sharing large Linux ISOs (by using a bit from each mirror & not choking one, along w/ P2P).

    No more waiting around when there are 0 seeders.

    1. Re:Instead of BT as an alternative to http/ftp... by kwark · · Score: 1
      If there were a way to specify a subsitute or alternate URL that would only be used in case of emergency when all the P2P seeds are down, it would save on bandwidth costs but also allow for a backup to turn an unfinished peer into a seeder. Then once their was a 100% seeder, the alternate URL would not need to be used, only the new seeder.

      Any decent client has these kind of options for seeding (I can only talk for Azureus (which also provides a tracker)):
      seed atleast x% and after that only if there are no minimun of seeds left or if the seeder/leecher ratio is below something.

      The effect is somehting that you describe and this all with only 1 protocol.

    2. Re:Instead of BT as an alternative to http/ftp... by Farroos · · Score: 1

      Why not run a BT client on another machine and make it a seed? with small upload bandwidth, it will be there to fill up missing parts when needed. Now you can really remove that http/ftp link.

    3. Re:Instead of BT as an alternative to http/ftp... by farnz · · Score: 1
      The BitTorrent FAQ for content providers suggests that a provider should run both a tracker and a seed. If you think about it, this is the only way that content can get into the system in the first place; without that initial seed, how does anyone have anything available to download?

      So, a legitimate provider can just keep that initial seed running, rather than stop it after a few uploads; if they run the seed on the system that would have run the HTTP server for a HTTP download, your worst case speeds are close to HTTP, and your best case speeds are higher.

      --
      I appear to have a blog. Odd.
  32. A manual BitTorrent proxy by tepples · · Score: 1

    Whenever you run across something like this that has legitimate scholarly merit that is relevant to your courseload, write another friendly note explaining how you need access to it.

    Given such a request, an IT staff member would probably investigate the request, wait for approval from the university's CTO, fire up Azureus himself*, download the file, and mirror it on the internal network. It would be like a manual BT proxy with all access controlled through the CTO.

    Just make polite, courteous explanations that you need legitimate access to specific resources.

    There's always the possibility that even if such access is granted, it may be so specific that the access you really wanted isn't included.

    *Standard English lacks a gender-neutral singular animate pronoun.

    1. Re:A manual BitTorrent proxy by fbjon · · Score: 1

      I thought "IT staff" means gender-neutral by default. Or at least single gender.

      --
      True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
  33. Already in the torrent business... by shundi · · Score: 1

    If I'm not mistaken ibiblo has been in the torrent business for some time, they host the artist approved live recording trade site http://bt.etree.org/, which provides safe downloads of live performances.

  34. 3dgamers.com by RipTides9x · · Score: 1

    They offer an alternative torrent download for demos, patches, in game video, and other goodness. They have been doing this for several years now AFAIK.

  35. Yay. by avasol · · Score: 1

    Legal Bittorrents. Yay. Almost a sexy as Government-approved country music.
    Move on.

  36. Re:filerush.com by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Filerush (a.k.a. AIXgaming) also offers torrents, unfortunately they host only the most popular stuff.

  37. Where's the public domain movies? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Didn't find no plan 9 from outer space, though...

  38. Project Gutenberg? by mumblestheclown · · Score: 0, Troll
    Project Gutenberg?

    Tell me again by one website managed hosted on a 29.99 / month server wouldnt be enough to host all of the project gutenberg text downloads for the whole world?

    For a bunch of supposedly "honest" computer people, so different from the "corrupt" lawyers and businesspeople always being bitched about here, this sure looks like an attempt to throw up some smokescreens to give bitTorrent the appearance of legitimacy. "Honest" people wouldn't have to resort to such actions, I would have thought.

  39. BBC video over IP pilot by frostilicus2 · · Score: 1

    The BBC is currently running a pilot experiment in distributing TV footage via p2p.

    Essentially, the system uses a custom media player (with in-built DRM) and p2p software to distribute segments of the file between users. Its architecture is very similar to Bittorent (in as much as a central seed server exists). If the pilot is successfull, it is likely that this technology could find its way into the set-top boxes of the future. This is a real possibility given that the UK telecoms network is soon to be completely overhauled.

    New Scientist magazine has also run an article on this.

    --
    Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
  40. Anime Trailers on BitTorrent by echocharlie · · Score: 1

    ADVision recently made a MADLAX trailer available on BitTorrent.

    --
    AnimeNEXT anime convention