Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Move Legal Data With Torrents?
An anonymous reader writes "We've recently seen a number of interesting projects come from bittorrent.com, including Sync and SoShare. I sometimes use torrents to move several GB of data, especially when pushing large bundles to multiple destinations. It's mostly a hodgepodge of open source tools, though. Apart from anecdotes and info from bittorrent.com, details are thin on the ground (e.g. the Blizzard Downloader). I have two questions for the Slashdot community. 1) Do you use BitTorrent to move data? If so, how? i.e. What kind of data and what's the implementation? 2) If you've looked at torrent clients/tools, what's missing in the open source ecosystem that would make it more useful for moving around large blobs of data?"
I specifically do not torrent anything that has copyright issues but I do seed a number of Linux distributions and development tools which do not prevent distribution in their licenses. Downloading anything using torrent is effectively distribution of the material too, so you had better KNOW that the license allows you to make copies and give them away.
You folks that torrent movies and stuff that is not in the public domain are crazy in my book.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
At work I need to install several different types/versions of linux OS's for testing. I always torrent the ISO as a way of "paying" for the image that I'm using.
A few years back, we did some experimenting with torrents over the Teragrid 10GBe backbone, to see how well that worked over the long haul between IL and CA. With just 2 endpoints, even on GBe, it wasn't better than a simple rsync. We did some small scale test with less than 10 cluster nodes on one side, but still not as useful as a Wide Area filesystem we were testing against. Bittorrent protocols just aren't optimized for a few nodes with a fat pipe between them.
I am interested in looking at the new Bitorrent Sync client to see how thanks for our setup. We have many users with 10's of TB's of data to push around on a weekly basis.
The Internet has no garbage collection
mostly for music that's under creative commons license and the occasional Linux download.
How would you use broadcast or multicast to distribute an OS? Call me ignorant, but how would you do that in practice?
Pretty easy to setup using Windows Deployment Services
http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/452-how-can-i-multicast-an-image-in-windows-deployment-services-windows-server-2008/
Or if Linux is your preference
http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/
Or Clonezilla has a multicast restore function
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-SE/use_clonezilla_live_in_drbl.php
You're confusing broadcast domain with collision domain.
On a switch, a collision domain is limited to the link itself, ie, collisions aren't possible. However, all ports on the switch (or all ports in the same VLAN, if the switch is manageable) share the same broadcast domain, which merely allows for all ports to contribute to saturation, but there still won't be any collisions