On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 01:23:01PM +0200, Keld Simonsen wrote:
Personally I would like to exploit the use of bittorrent seeds hosted by mirrors - maybe that would scale well, and give quite evenly spread bandwidth use on the mirror infrastructure. Maybe gwdg.de can tell us more, and whether there could be some generalized way to do this in a distributed way. And also about performance - I have had bad experience with a lot of HTTP connections and therefore I redirected all .iso downloads to FTP.
During the past months, I have been working on native torrent support in MirrorBrain. It is relatively complete. Contrary to the current torrents that openSUSE offers, the torrents generated by MirrorBrain will contain mirror URLs for web seeding. That should help, and as far as I understand, save mirror admins the work of seeding manually. Of course, the listed mirrors will automatically be the ones closest to the user. The next MirrorBrain release will ship the new code. I can't say when I find the time to accomplish the release, but the code is already running at OOo's download server, e.g.: http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/stable/3.2.1/OOo_3.2.1_Linux_x... It cannot really be tried out, though, because no involved tracker knows about the torrents yet. I thought this features might be interesting for openSUSE. I'm relatively new to torrents though, and torrents are badly standardized and I found it hard to create a "good" torrent. There might be bugs or things that can be improved. Hints appreciated. Peter