[arch-releng] Bittorrent with webseeds

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:09:24 -0600
Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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


So, is there anything wrong with linuxtracker.org ? It's not under our
control but is that a problem?

Dieter