Torrents of Samba source
Samba is a popular open-source
project. Many people, happy with Samba, want to mirror
the web site, both so that it is easily available from their network,
and as a way of giving back
to the project.
An unintended consequence is that the master server ends up sending a lot of traffic to small mirrors, which may well end up increasing the load on the original server they were trying to help. This is because people typically mirror the whole download directory, including old versions and binaries for obsolete and irrelevant platforms (SCO). (There are various small things we could do or have done to try to prevent this.)
A more interesting (partial) solution is to use BitTorrent, which is specifically designed for distributing large, popular files. There is now a .torrent file in the download directory; if you click it from a machine with bittorrent installed you'll get a copy of Samba from the p2p network.
This also gives a very nice way for people to contribute to the cost of distributing Samba: just leave the client running when it's finished downloading, and it will pass the source on to other people. If you already have a copy of the tarball by other means then you can put it in the bittorrent working directory and it will start serving immediately.
(This is the theory; let's see how well it works out.)
posted Wed 5 Jan 2005 in /software/bittorrent | link
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