On Wed August 23 2006 12:32, Blars Blarson wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]