Re: Debian ISOs
On Wed August 23 2006 12:32, Blars Blarson wrote:
> In article <[🔎] 1156329705.4961.51.camel@silicium.ccc.cea.fr>
>
> joss@debian.org writes:
> >When a nice bittorrent frontend is installed, the user will only
> > have to click on the link to start the download. This is true for
> > Windows and Linux.
>
> You left out the reconfigure the firewall(s) step. Not only is this
> non-trivial, the user may not have the ability to do so.
This is a bit of a red herring. Torrents work without re-configuring
firewalls, they just don't work as well. There appears to be two
reasons for that (all of this is, "afaict", and I've only looked at it
superficially so far):
The desire to spread the server load over many peers and foil "leeches"
has resulted in a policy where `the download rate is proportional to
the upload rate.' With an unconfigured firewall the client can only
upload to clients it is downloading from, it is the resulting limited
upload rate which chokes the download rate. Since the policy is set by
the tracker, and Debian would need to manage its own tracker[1], this
problem should be managable without too many hoops.
Another reason for non-trivial reconfiguration is because clients can
have braindead out-of-the box configurations. e.g., last time I looked
at bittornado it was setup to randomly use any of 50,000 ports[2]. The
user ends up needing to configure both the firewall and client to
realize the full potential. So, if the problem above is managable, this
one would be a non-issue.
On the other hand, if it turns out that it is not possible to overcome
mis|unconfigured firewalls with more liberal tracker policy and/or
client configs, it becomes a question of whether there are enough users
able and willing to jump through the hoops to make offering the service
worthwhile (main distribution method or not). <shrug> I dunno how to
determine that, but active torrents of Debian .iso's do exist, see:
http://www.torrentz.com/search_debian
- Bruce
[1] to ensure the network is not used to distribute non-Debian stuff
[2] 50,000 ports... to complicate port based bandwidth limiting or
filtering?
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