FI Future

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 15:12 -0600, Matt Domsch wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 06:46:51PM +0100, Zarouali Rachid wrote:
> >      Having more Bittorrent seeds for the ISO downloads available on release
> >      day.  This should make bittorrent a much more attractive download option
> >      for users and should relieve the strain on the regular mirrors.  What
> >      I'd suggest is that some trusted members of the community be set up with
> >      early access to the bittorrent trackers so that they can get a local
> >      copy of the ISOs and can then be seeds for the general public.  This
> >      wouldn't need to be a long-term commitment of resources - perhaps 2-3
> >      days before the release day, and then a week or so after release.
> 
> We can ask our normal mirrors if they would like to seed.  Would need
> a little script they could run to hardlink the rsync trees into the
> bittorrent trees so we don't pull it twice.
> 
> Seth, can we have a "private" tracker that is later made "public" ?
> I'm not that familiar with bittorrent.  I suspect that's
> security-through-obscurity though - anyone who finds the tracker could
> hop on.

you'd be correct. We've talked about doing this before and it's been a
nightmare.

it would be far better 
> 
> We do have 55 formal mirrors, each serving some subset of
> {http,ftp,rsync}, and if have a sane embargo window of say 3 days,
> that's sufficient to get all of those synced.  Any less time and we
> cap out the master servers' bandwidths and not everyone gets synced
> before the release. 

and none of them have the isos in the layout we have them for the
torrent.
zero.

> If we're going to add early bittorrent seeders (e.g. not just the
> above mirrors), they would need to have fairly significant bandwidth
> at their disposal (e.g. larger than a DSL/Cable modem line).  And we
> may need more embargo time to get them distributed.  Would be
> interesting to try with say test2 and test3 rather than starting it
> only at the final release.

If you want bittorrent seeders you'd be better off having them just be
random mirrors who want to participate and can sync down the data in
advance from the torrent.

However, I'd suggest that this is silly. If only b/c we've not gotten
any reliable complaints about problems with performance in the torrent.

-sv