[arch-releng] Bittorrent with webseeds

[Dan McGee]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:02:25 +0200
> Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 10:28:46AM +0100, Steffen Bönigk wrote:
>> > Grigorios Bouzakis schrieb:
>> >> Sorry for quoting the wrong part of the discussion, but does
>> >> anyone have any knowledge regarding creation of torrent trackers?
>> >> IMO it would be preferable to distribute ALL ISOs/IMGs even the
>> >> alpha/betas using torrents with the least server load as possible.
>> >> Many distributions have small torrent trackers set up. Maybe its
>> >> time to have that in Arch too. Especially since theres an Official
>> >> Release Team now, which plans on providing as much as possible
>> >> frequent updates. FTR i had suggested the same thing around 2
>> >> years ago, but the discussion didnt lead anywhere. Maybe things
>> >> are more mature now. Im pretty sure that its not so difficult to
>> >> set up.
>> >>
>> >> Greg
>> >
>> > Hello, to set up a torrent tracker you may want to try
>> > http://phpbttrkplus.sourceforge.net/
>> >
>> > Steffen
>>
>> I was thinking more of something like
>> http://www.whitsoftdev.com/opentracker/ . Statistics arent needed.
>> Just a plain simple tracker.
>
> Personally I like statistics :) amount of seeders, leechers, and if
> possible: amount of people who completed a download and/or (roughly) the
> amount of p2p traffic.
>
>
> linuxtracker also seems to show some statistics.  assuming
> linuxtracker has a high uptime (it was just down for a while but that
> can be coincidence) I don't see what's wrong with using it.
>
> Pierre: does linuxtracker show the amount of people who completed a
> download and/or (roughly) the
> amount of p2p traffic.
>
>
>>
>> "OpenTracker is a simplistic, lightweight, standards-compliant
>> BitTorrent peer tracker. It is written in PHP and requires only a
>> single MySQL table to function. It does not create or use files on
>> disk, nor is it a continuously executing process, making it ideal for
>> virtual web hosts.
>> Compared with other popular trackers, OpenTracker is limited. It
>> provides no interface for searching or viewing files or statistics.
>> Rather, it is purely a tracker, plain and simple, which in many cases
>> is just what is wanted."
>>
>> Greg
>
>
> "It tracks torrent swarms blindly without first requiring seeders to
> upload torrent files. In order to use the tracker, one only has to
> create a torrent with the tracker's announce URL and begin seeding that
> torrent. No preparation of the tracker is needed or possible. "
>
> Huh? does this mean that everyone could (ab)use our tracker, using
> it for torrents that have nothing to do with Arch?

Lets take a quick step back here. We've discussed this in the past, so
I'll try to bring that to the table.

We need a tracker:
1) that only seeds torrents we tell it to, not anything else
2) is relatively lightweight
3) doesn't suck

Gentoo uses PHPBTTracker+ 2.1. Debian and Ubuntu use BitTornado. I
took a brief look at both of these products this morning and was not
impressed- they seem old and a bit out of date, underdeveloped, and
just don't do things "right" in my humble opinion. PHPBTTracker has
some crazy caching idea where they try to reinvent the wheel and
appear to fail miserably. BitTornado looks more usable, although it
hasn't been touched in some time and the codebase is not so clean.

-Dan