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BitTorrent for Content Providers
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."
Great idea. It legitimizes BitTorrent as a protocol and it makes find some great content easy. Torrents On!
Thalasar
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.
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"
--
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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
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"
Why wouldn't you just change the port you're using?
Finally, a Slashdotting that's a good thing.
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
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"
... while homebrew distributions will fail to qualify./
..'nough said ...
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions
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???
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
..a hybrid might be better for independent smaller groups to distribute stuff.
.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.
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
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.
Wow. You're single bad experience has destroyed my image of BitTorrent. It clearly has to be the worst thing ever...
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.
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.
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.
Legal Bittorrents. Yay. Almost a sexy as Government-approved country music.
Move on.
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
ADVision recently made a MADLAX trailer available on BitTorrent.
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