On Sun, 2010-09-26 at 07:47 +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
I don't recall any protocols being standard.
Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors.
Adrian
Less smoky is the relatively common practice (at least in Europe) of tech-friendly ISPs running bittorrent for "release days" of Linux and BSD distros; Ubuntu releases especially because they have a large proportion of release-day installs (!) and the servers get hit hard. How much of this is just staff doing their customers a favor is debateable, but I know two places where it's written into SOPs for Debian and FreeBSD major releases (about a week or two after the release). Linux distribution by bittorrent is sometimes harder now that more Tier 1 ISPs block or inspect the P2P traffic By a bit of quick fiddling you can ensure that users outside your blocks don't get served. I'm talking installation ISOs, not the ports or packages - the rsyncs and mirrors take care of that as normal. For the Debian 5.05 release I provided 700GB+ in a week for the x86 Gnome CD alone via BT, the AMD64 CD was about twice that, yet most of the Debian stuff will be done using Jigdo, so that's a fraction of the actual traffic. The Debian Netboot CD's seem quite popular too but especially for exotic hardware archs. The 5.06 release is still flowing nicely. The last few FreeBSD releases I've pushed 500GB each time though I hold them open for much longer for the less popular architectures. The thought of it all flying round in such long circles dismays me somewhat. There's probably an reasonable argument for temporary ISP-BT of this stuff, as it'll save us all a tiny bit of peak and a lot of packets, all for very little kit, space and man-hours. The rest of the torrent users, (games or copytheft), can surely be /dev/null-ed ? :) Hmm, can I smell burning torches in the distance? Gord -- # Hahaha, hehehe, I'm a little Gnome and I hate KDE