RE: [gentoo-mirrors] Gentoo Linux 2007.0 and BitTorrent

[Greg Cornell]

Hi Robin,

I'm happy to serve up the content via whatever protocols Gentoo needs.
However, I haven't set up bittorrent before so maybe a short howto on
settting up bittorrent (and even checking for the range support in apache)
would be helpful.

Greg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robin H. Johnson [mailto:robbat2@g.o]
> Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 6:44 PM
> To: gentoo-mirrors@l.g.o
> Cc: wolf31o2@g.o
> Subject: [gentoo-mirrors] Gentoo Linux 2007.0 and BitTorrent
>
> On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 04:34:19PM -0700, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> > Would all mirrors that carry the experimental tree please see my
> > follow-up email about BitTorrent HTTP-seeding?
>
> Hi folks,
>
> So now stuff on BitTorrent for the 2007.0 release.
>
> There's two portions to this email, firstly stuff distributed by
> BitTorrent only, and then everything else.
>
> We have 94 torrents in total, 2 of which are only media that is only
> being distributed by BitTorrent.
>
> We needs seeds for all of it, but the bittorrent-only stuff more than
> the rest. I have one sponsor offering 50Mbit * 2 weeks for seeding
> everything so far.
>
> In terms of basic structure, there is a .torrent for every .tar.bz2 or
> .iso in releases or experimental, containing the core file, plus it's
> DIGESTS, signature, and CONTENTS files.
>
> BitTorrent-only:
> 3.7G	livedvd-amd64-installer-2007.0/
> 3.8G	livedvd-i686-installer-2007.0/
>
> If you're interested in direct BitTorrent seeding (esp. for the above
> two, even if you aren't seeding anything else), please give me a shout
> so that I can arrange to get them to you.
>
> Now for the experimental part...
>
> To help out long-term seeding of the majority of torrents (those that
> aren't bittorrent-only), I'd like to take advantage of the newish HTTP-
> seeding support of BitTorrent [1].
>
> HTTP-seeding kicks in at a MUCH lower priority than regular BitTorrent
> peering, basically helping clients that cannot contact any other source
> for missing pieces. It effectively converts the BitTorrent client to a
> slightly-smart HTTP fetcher that then shares the blocks back over
> BitTorrent to other clients.
>
> For all experimental/ mirrors, that means we're adding a directory tree
> under experimental/ that has directories containing only symlinks. Your
> rsync options will need to have the various symlink-transfer options,
> which I think should be in place already.
>
>
> Here's an example of one.
> experimental/torrent-symlinks/stage3-x86-2007.0:
> lrwxrwxrwx stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2 ->
> ../../releases/x86/2007.0/stages/stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2
> lrwxrwxrwx stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2.CONTENTS ->
> ../../releases/x86/2007.0/stages/stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2.CONTENTS
> lrwxrwxrwx stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2.DIGESTS ->
> ../../releases/x86/2007.0/stages/stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2.DIGESTS
> lrwxrwxrwx stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2.asc ->
> ../../releases/x86/2007.0/stages/stage3-x86-2007.0.tar.bz2.asc
>
> This in itself doesn't make the BitTorrent clients contact you, so even
> if you aren't participating, it doesn't cause harm to have it.
>
> For part two of the HTTP-seeding (eg making the BT clients actually use
> the mirrors), I'd like to know which of the experimental mirrors are
> interested in being used for HTTP seeding.
>
> Your webservers will need to support HTTP Range requests for this to
> work. The BitTorrent clients will send range requests for 32K..256K
> blocks (powers of two only).
>
> I'll be placing the base potion of your URLs into the .torrent files,
> as "$BASEURL/experimental/torrent-symlinks/"
>
> [1] The actual specification for the HTTP-seeding is here:
>     http://www.getright.com/seedtorrent.html
>
> --
> Robin Hugh Johnson
> Gentoo Linux Developer & Council Member
> E-Mail     : robbat2@g.o
> GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85

-- 
gentoo-mirrors@g.o mailing list