Hi, Macheal, Konstantin, and Sean. You are all quite correct in your statments. BitTorrent is not directly suitable as-is for YUM, and could not easily be modified to build my envisioned FTP-like utility. Significant modifications are going to be required to address the issues you've raised, and some other issues. I posted to the BitTorrent list (bittorrent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) with some initial ideas on how to address the technical issues. There are some guys there who are quite well versed in BT. To summarize some of the issues identified so far: - Need to deal with high tracker overhead - Need to download just headers efficiently - Need to deal with small file updates efficiently - Need to be optimized for lots of small files instead of one big file - Need to be aware of electrical distance between peers to find good peers As for why local mirrors aren't popular... I suspect it's because there are a LOT of sites out there that people download from. You can't mirror them all locally, unless you're a huge ISP. However, we could mirror them all with BT based servers. I could probably serve RPMs to the entire FC4 community from my laptop over wireless. As for technical issues in BT, they can all be addressed, but a new protocol will have to be implemented. It can be similar to BT (even a strict super-set). However, it will be a new protocol. For me, that's the fun part. I've implemented a BT client in the past, and even played around with some fairly complex protocol extensions. I think I've got a fairly good platform for building the FTP-like utility. When complete (assuming I get the time... always the problem), it could potentially: -- Have very low tracker overhead -- Be optimized for lots of small file downloads -- Also work well with very large files -- Allow efficient download of headers -- Allow for fairly secure, robust downloads -- Minimize server traffic while retaining accurate download stats -- Maximize client download speed -- Localize traffic Details of the changes to BT are probably best left to the BitTorrent list, but it probably includes things like: -- Using Olaf's Merkle tree spec to support efficient -- Combining the tracker into the FTP-like server software -- Adding support for a tree of trackers, rooted at the server -- Have the trackers to help locate peers who actually have the files needed and are electrically close -- Adding version diff capabilities so you can ask the tracker what files have been added/deleted since your last update It would be a lot of work, but I'm convinced it's doable. My problem is finding motivation to work on it when I'm already overloaded at work. I basically have to do this kind of work between 2am-7am. If someone in the YUM crowd were excited about it, that would help a lot. BTW, I don't have a good name for the utility, assuming I do work on it. Is BTFS (for BitTorrent File System) any good? I was also hoping to build a fuse interface to the utility that would allow you to mount the served directory structure as a local disk. Is BT-FTP better? Thanks, Bill
