18 Jan
2011
18 Jan
'11
11:35 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 12:59:36PM -0500, Keith M wrote:
I think from a practical perspective, simply seeding
the data once
with bittorrent on a popular tracker usually works for rare stuff.
The more rare something is (provided there's still SOME interest) in
it, the more people will go out of their way to make sure it's
available. You may only have 1/2 dozen seeders at any given time,
but that's usually enough. Even for 10gb sized downloads.
We (a fellow admin and I) have been talking about mirroring bitsavers
(and perhaps other sources) "any day now". Perhaps setting up a tracker
and create torrents would be a more sensible use of bandwidth!
I see a few issues with it though.
1. On what level should I make the torrent? One per file, one per
subdirectory, one per manufacturer?
- I'm thinking both subdir and manufacturer. It is then easy to
select what files you want from a torrent.
2. How does one handle updates?
- I have no clue ... a whole new torrent for one new/changed/deleted
file in a directory? Is there such a thing as incremental torrents?
3. Would bitsavers and other agree to be a seed as well?
- A critical mass of users is ofcourse necessary.
Hmm.. perhaps I should just rsync it and use the existing ftp server.
Cheers,
Pontus