Monday, April 12, 2004 2:37 PM
szurgot
P2P and Official Releases
There's been a lot of talk about the Community Tech Releases, and how large to make the availability (and how to distribute it) A lot of people suggest some sort of P2P mechansim (I agree), and several suggest BitTorrent (I also agree, but have some caveats)
Bittorrent is a P2P client designed for single large files or collections. It seems to be unique in that a single “torrent” can contain many files, but it will still only treat it as one download. I understand it's used for World of Warcraft Beta, but since I'm not on that, I can't say for sure how it works. But RedHat uses it for their new Fedora Project downloads. The have about 10 torrents available (A couple of full DVDs, one with 32 bit, one with 64 bit, two sets of CDs (3 install CDs, & 3 source CDs)) The DVDs were single ISOs, but the CDs were three ISOs, but you only had to download them as one unit. Nice. The protocol itself makes a great concept for download of large files/distributions.
The problem comes in that the way RedHat uses the program is really rough. You are invited to “join the torrent“, given a link to the main download, basic firewall adjusting instructions, and the list of links. From there, you're on your own. It'll download, but you have no control over how many peers, max download speed, etc... I think the best solution would be to wrap the BitTorrent tool in a download manager, and allow it to handle all the sundry tasks (capturing the main file, setting the directory, handling the firewall, etc...) In large part, disasocciate it from BitTorrent in general, just use the technology. This will present a much better face, and probably make it a much better experience.
And allow a way to throttle download speed. When downloading Linux, it when't full speed, and I couldn't do anything else on the machine, except by stopping and restarting, which meant I had time while it reconnected to everybody.
Filed under: .NET