>>>>> "P" == Pierre Fortin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
P> I *love* it when someone implements an idea mere hours before I
P> propose it... :^)
Proving again how great minds are frequently un-original with respect
to one another ;)
P> Yes, I was planning to propose a distributed download scheme
P> because it took a long time to find a usable server (just
P> finished downloading 8.0).
Alas, I live on the remote tip of a tiny Internet tributary and have
no hope of downloading it over 56k; hmmm ... maybe in recognition of
my efforts to ease the downloading pain, someone at Mandrake might
snail-mail me a tradeshow-giveaway cardboard-wrapped pressing of the
8.0 kit :) (hey, I can dream!)
P> If anyone else uses this system, it would be nice to hear any
P> pros/cons you encounter.
I did find one con: My Gateway has no way to tell whether you are
actually downloading the file; it is totally passive and just hands
you a list of recent swarm participants, then steps out of the picture
and hopes for the best. The Gateway expires you from the list of
candidates after a "reasonable" amount of time --- unfortunately, the
'reasonable' time was not reasonable at all and lead to a lot
of dead nodes.
My apologies if you (at least 100 so far) had tried to download but
found you were getting only the original site (because the others had
long since left) -- hopefully your throughput was no worse than
traditional HTTP. As I said in my posting, this works best when
you co-ordinate with some buddies to do your downloading together.
I have just adjusted the timeout to a more reasonably value, but a
side-effect is that the Gateway lost record of those who are were so
kind as to keep their client running to offer your host as a semi
permanent swarm-support site -- to be re-registered as a potential
swarm partner, just hit the URL again every few hours; you can use any
kind of browser (ie lynx) and just ignore the result; the gateway
simply tracks those who have _requested_ the resource, and pinging the
page like this keeps you in the list of most recent requests.
Those URLs again ...
Install Disk:
http://swarmgate.opencola.com/gate/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fftp.belnet.be%2Fpackages%2FMandrake%2Fiso%2FMandrake80-inst.iso
Extensions Disk:
http://swarmgate.opencola.com/gate/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fftp.belnet.be%2Fpackages%2FMandrake%2Fiso%2FMandrake80-ext.iso
>> If you can't use those links (due to MTA munging) you can find
>> the links on http://www.teledyn.com
The particular snapshot I used for the Gateway is two weeks old, and
was not terrific about building big mesh lists, but it _mostly_ works
_reasonably_ well in _most_ situations; big problems are NAT'd hosts
and getting stuck linked to someone with a slow connection.
There will be an updated and far more efficient release of the Gateway
sometime in early May, but Mandrake needed it now, so I took the
chance that the pre-release code would be better than no code.
My thanks to all of those brave people who gave it a shot (and please
don't stop!) You've been a terrific aid to helping us find bugs. We'd
tried other informal announcements on various mailing lists, but it's
the Mandrake-cooker people who have given us our best live test.
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723
T(C)Inc Business Innovations through Open Source http://www.teledyn.com
KernelWiki Community Linux Docs: http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/wiki
