Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

PDTP - The Best of Both FTP and BitTorrent? 265

Posted by simoniker from the no-more-april-fools dept.
ikewillis writes "For awhile I've been following the development of PDTP (Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol), which is trying to merge the concepts of FTP and BitTorrent. This sounds like it could be useful for apt-get repositories or other high demand FTP sites. It's designed to be used as part of scalable networks which could replace manual selection of FTP mirrors. It also supports a number of other nifty features like cryptographic file signatures. Isn't it about time we ditched FTP for something better?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

PDTP - The Best of Both FTP and BitTorrent? More

PDTP - The Best of Both FTP and BitTorrent?

Comments Filter:

  • from the no-more-april-fools dept. (Score:4, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:01PM (#8742656) Homepage Journal
    Too late! Tin Foil hat firmly in place!

    Next thing it'll be transmitting voice and pictures over radio waves... AS IF!

  • This isn't fair... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:01PM (#8742660)
    I feel sorry for these people. See, this isn't your typical slashdotting... It's a slashdotting that comes after eighteen consecutive nonsense stories being posted over twelve hours on the US April Fool's Day.

    So, their chance to build a reputation is going to be damaged by the fact that anybody reading Slashdot today has already given up on finding anything useful, and will be evaluating them as a joke that they're "not getting" rather than as a proposed networking scheme.

    Furthermore, the geek world is bored today by Slashdot's denial-of-normal-service throughout the day. So, once word leaks out that this is a real and normal story, they're going to get all of the pent up slashdotting force applied to their server.

    Simon, you should have started your set tonight with an NY Times article or two. That would have been a suitable transition between nonsense content and factual content, since NYT operates in that murky space and has a suitable web setup to absorb a larger-than-usual slashdotting. I'm sure the people at PDTP would have not minded at all if their moment in the sun had come an hour later tonight.

  • BitTorrent Mod That's Neophyte Friendly (Score:4, Informative)

    by chatooya ( 718043 ) * on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:01PM (#8742663)
    BannedMusic.org [bannedmusic.org] made a BitTorrent wrapper that installs the application and then automatically launches the download, they call it an "easy downloader" and have instructions and a script [bannedmusic.org] for sites that want to make their own. Makes it a *lot* easier for sites to give out big files to non-techy audiences.
    • Reminds me eerily of the previously mentioned [slashdot.org] method Blizzard is using for World of Warcraft beta distribution...

    • need lightweight clients, not installers (Score:5, Informative)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:34PM (#8742886)
      BannedMusic.org made a BitTorrent wrapper that installs the application and then automatically launches the download, they call it an "easy downloader" and have instructions and a script for sites that want to make their own.

      And unfortunately, it's windows only, and still requires installing the software, which is 3MB+.

      What is needed is something along the lines of a very small, very simple java client or a browser plugin. Azureus is java, but is huge and has massive feature-bloat for the purposes of just downloading(and sharing back) one file. However, Bram and others don't seem terribly interested in expanding possibilities; a mac developer offered up numerous improvements to the BitTorrent team for the mac client(which among other things is based on 3.3a, not 3.4.1, weeks after 3.4.1 released) and was rewarded with deafening silence.

      The bittorrent protocol is http based. It's extensively documented on the bitconjurer website. Cmon folks, let's at least see a mozilla plugin or something! :-)

  • apt-get, you say? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Deraj DeZine ( 726641 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:06PM (#8742700)

    Quoth the Debian Troll [slashdot.org]:

    Even though the apt-get code is GPL'ed and therefore available for all to read, the majority of people miss a few subtle points in the source code. The assembly optimizations. The OpenGL hooks. The MP3 streaming capabilities. Instant messaging interfaces. Links to satellite tracking networks. I believe apt-get to be on par with such great open source works as the Linux kernel, Apache, and xbill. It is about the package format. It is about apt-get. It's about standing up and saying "Dammit, I'm sick of RPM not having any cluster management capabilities or Mac OS X Expose-like animations, I'm mad as hell AND I'M NOT TAKING IT ANY MORE!"

  • raid (Score:4, Funny)

    by name773 ( 696972 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:06PM (#8742701)
    R.A.I.D. == redundant array of intolerable diversions
    or at least on april fool's day....
    • Sounds almost like Slashdot. I never get shit done when I have access to the internet because of this place.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The concept is great, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by baximus ( 552800 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:09PM (#8742723)
    ...mirrors would need to be in sync at all times for this to work. Otherwise your PDTP client is only able to download from the mirrors that are in sync, or worse, will get some chunks from files that aren't up-to-date, causing problems.

    Unfortunately, it's (almost) impossible to mirror new files instantaneously, so mirrors are never all in sync, all the time.

    • Re:The concept is great, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by anthonyclark ( 17109 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:20PM (#8742796)
      I'm assuming that you're going to raise that potential problem with the pdtp developers, right?

      Sorry, pet peeve is people kvetching about something on /. but not telling the developers.

      To fix this, perhaps they could mandate that mirrors copy a particular directory to a temporary location, then take the old directory offline for the few minutes it would take to copy the new files over. Or have a $RELEASE var that clients would ask for and get returned all files marked with that var.

      or something. ;-)
    • Files (or file segments) could be matched up using hashes that ensure that the proper files are sought and grabbed. MD5 could provide the primary file hash, and then a faster hash could be used for individual segments. The hash could be calculated at the beginning of the segment transfer as part of the handshake process, then stored on the client box for comparison once the segment transfer is complete. If the hash matches, then it's saved and the system continues. If not, the segment is dropped and a n
    • That's just not true. If you say "download ftp.us.debian.org/pool/etc/etc/etc/gnaughty_blah_ b lah_1.00001.deb then you will get the tracker for that file and you will only connect to people downloading that file. If you get the tracker on a site that hasn't been updated yet then you get the tracker for gnaughty 1.0. Same thing as with files today. If you download from a site that has been sync'd and i don't we get different files. in the current case it is the whole deb. with this it would be a tracker.
    • It's obvious that you didn't read about the project at all. I can't believe you got modded Insightful. Ooops, nevermind, I just remembered this is Slashdot.

    • Re:The concept is great, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by tarcieri ( 767748 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @01:54AM (#8744538)
      Hello. I'm the designer of PDTP.
      ...mirrors would need to be in sync at all times for this to work. Otherwise your PDTP client is only able to download from the mirrors that are in sync, or worse, will get some chunks from files that aren't up-to-date, causing problems. Unfortunately, it's (almost) impossible to mirror new files instantaneously, so mirrors are never all in sync, all the time.
      I suggest you look at this page with graphic illustrations of PDTP networks [pdtp.org] for a better idea of how PDTP works. There is no concept of a "mirror" in a PDTP network. The Source Server is the central authority on all files being distributed over the network, and notifies all servers/piece proxies on the network whenever files become available or unavailable. Like BitTorrent, the network is largely self-sustaining, with clients uploading pieces to each other and verifying their integrity with MD5 or SHA1 checksums. Files are tracked on the network with integer keys, so if a file were altered its name would simply be mapped to a new key, and the entire network would be notified that the previous version is no longer available.

      • Hash trees! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:25AM (#8745178) Homepage
        Please don't use straight SHA1 - it requires downloading the entire file to verify.

        Bittorrent and some other file sharing networks split the file into chunks and keep metadata with the hashes of chunks. The problem with this idea is how big to make the chunks: too big and you need to download a big chunk before you can verify. Too small and the list of hashes itself takes too long to download (the hashes are what makes .torrent files relatively big).

        I think the solution should be to use hash trees. Split the file into relatively small chunks (1k?) and calculate their hashes. Now take every two consecutive hashes and hash them. Repeat with the hash results from the previous step until you have a tree with a single hash at its root. The root hash represents the entire file just like an MD5 of SHA1 sum. The difference is that with a small amount of metadata as hints you can verify any part of the file without downloading the entire file. All you need is a short (log n) chain of hashes leading down to the root hash. The server will trickle the hash information interleaved with the download and the client will verify it on the fly and never need to write a single byte to the disk before it's cryptographically verified.

        • Re:Hash trees! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Bazzargh ( 39195 )
          Moderators, how is the parent insightful? He's just misread the post he replied to!

          Please don't use straight SHA1 - it requires downloading the entire file to verify.

          Bittorrent and some other file sharing networks split the file into chunks and keep metadata with the hashes of chunks.

          Re read the grandparent:
          with clients uploading pieces to each other and verifying their integrity with MD5 or SHA1 checksums (emphasis mine, especialy on the pronoun)

          ie the SHA1s are of the pieces (ie chunks) not the wh

        • Re:Hash trees! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by laird ( 2705 )
          "The problem with this idea is how big to make the chunks: too big and you need to download a big chunk before you can verify. Too small and the list of hashes itself takes too long to download ... I think the solution should be to use hash trees"

          This sounds clever, but the percentages don't work. Sure, a .torrent file might be 8K for a TV show, or 150K for an entire season of a TV show (to use two .torrent files that I have handy). Yes, those files are large, but let's keep it in perspective: the 8K file

  • think about that sentence: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Naikrovek ( 667 ) <jjohnson.psg@com> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:10PM (#8742726)
    Isn't it about time we ditched FTP for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched CDs for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched telnet for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched CRTs for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched 20-year-old TV sets for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched COBOL for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched BASIC for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched SCO Unix for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched DOS for something better?

    Isn't it about time we ditched Dubya for something better?

    my point is that there is a lot of very old crap out there that should be replaces, but is going to get used and keep getting used for years to come.
    • Seems to me telnet is virtually dead.
      Right up there with *BSD, but with less cheerleaders.

    • Re:think about that sentence: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:22PM (#8742811)
      Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better?
      CD-RW

      Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better?
      SATA

      Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better?
      AMD

      Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better?
      Linux

      Isn't it about time we ditched CDs for something better?
      DVDs

      Isn't it about time we ditched telnet for something better?
      SSH

      Isn't it about time we ditched CRTs for something better?
      LCDs

      Isn't it about time we ditched 20-year-old TV sets for something better?
      New TVs, available at your local stores.

      Isn't it about time we ditched COBOL for something better?
      Visual Basic.

      Isn't it about time we ditched BASIC for something better?
      Uhm... it's for beginners. We can't ditch the biginners...

      Isn't it about time we ditched SCO Unix for something better?
      Linux... we think.

      Isn't it about time we ditched DOS for something better?
      Windows XP

      Isn't it about time we ditched Dubya for something better?
      John Kerry
      • Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better?
        CD-RW
        iPod used as FireWire disk.

        Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better?
        SATA
        Mmm... Tasty FireWire.

        Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better?
        AMD
        PowerPC

        Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better?
        Linux
        Mac OS X

        Isn't it about time we ditched CDs for something better?
        DVDs
        Depends on context. iPod fills many uses of CD's. (music storage, data backup) Not software distribu
      • >>Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better?
        >CD-RW
        Yeah, no one uses floppies for small files. Or bigger ones. Many people I know, including my family, don't have CD-RW or even CD-R.

        >>Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better?
        >SATA
        And where is this option on dell.com/apple.com etc? Can you buy this at walmart? That stuff is nice for high end servers but...

        >>Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better?
        >AMD
        So we went from

    • Re:think about that sentence: (Score:5, Funny)

      by Deraj DeZine ( 726641 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:22PM (#8742816)

      Problems solved:

      Isn't it about time we ditched FTP for something better? HTTP
      Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better? Tape drives
      Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better? Cool, thin IDE cables
      Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better? x86-64
      Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better? Windows XP
      Isn't it about time we ditched CDs for something better? Coasters
      Isn't it about time we ditched telnet for something better? Clear text passwords over HTTP
      Isn't it about time we ditched CRTs for something better? Incandescent light arrays
      Isn't it about time we ditched 20-year-old TV sets for something better? 19 year-old TV sets
      Isn't it about time we ditched COBOL for something better? FORTRAN
      Isn't it about time we ditched BASIC for something better? Power BASIC
      Isn't it about time we ditched SCO Unix for something better? SCO Linux
      Isn't it about time we ditched DOS for something better? Protected mode DOS
      Isn't it about time we ditched Dubya for something better? Jon Stewart
    • That is not a very good argument in favour of using less advanced systems. There are many valid arguments in favour of using what's known to work... proven reliability, difficulty of switching, even plain old tradition. However, stating that we shouldn't use something new because other older things are still in use is a pretty silly line of reasoning.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Bubya BETTER NOT be around for years to come.

    • Re:think about that sentence: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by alan_dershowitz ( 586542 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:34PM (#8742888)
      You made your point, but there's a disconnect between your point and why its relevant to the original statement. If someone said to me "isn't it time we ditched floppy disks for something better?" I'd probably say "yeah", not jump all over their ass because someone somewhere uses floppy disks.

    • Kerry (Score:2)

      by ink ( 4325 ) *
      Isn't it about time we ditched Dubya for something better?

      Too bad we have to pick between a moron and a charlatan.

    • My take...

      Isn't it about time we ditched FTP for something better? SCP, SSH (fish:/), etc.. though a P2P FTPish setup would be cool.

      Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better? USB Memory Stick or perhaps CD-RW/DVD+RW

      Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better? SATA

      Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better? AMD64 .. perhaps PowerPC?

      Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better? I like FreeBSD w/KDE :) and yes, it is better
    • What in God's name is wrong with x86? I hear this all the time. It's just like Slashdot's bizarre fascination with bashing X because it's old. But interestingly enough, X continues to thrive for the same reason x86 continues to thrive: it works, works today, and works with your old applications. The fastest desktop and workstation processors on the planet are x86.

      Ok, sure, CISC is dead, x86 is a convoluted mess, yada yada yada, but engineers have gotten around many of these problems with the instructio

  • piracy returns to ftp? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AssProphet ( 757870 ) * on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:11PM (#8742739) Homepage Journal
    Interesting... this could bring piracy back to the ftp world, rather than the emule appz or bittorrent world where it's easier to get caught.
  • Will there also be an sPDTP, a cryptographically secure version for those who want to secure the set of trusted peers away from the prying eyes of those outside the clique?

  • about time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by evenprime ( 324363 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:16PM (#8742769) Homepage Journal
    Isn't it about time we ditched FTP for something better?"

    We already have. It is called SCP [openssh.org]

  • P2P Research (Score:5, Informative)

    by Demandred ( 13894 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:19PM (#8742789)
    There are several P2P research projects that are looking at building reliabale and scalable P2P systems.

    Take a look at Tapestry [berkeley.edu], and Chord [mit.edu] (and read some of the papers) to understand the issues involved in providing scalable and high performance P2P services. Not only is scalable search and overlay graph connectivity an issue, but also node failure and short session times of P2P nodes.

    Additionally, when you actually handle the issue of downloading data, building application-lvel multicast trees to distribute the data efficiently on a large scale is not easy. Two papers from SOSP '03 SplitStream [microsoft.com], and Bullet [rochester.edu] address that issue.
    • SplitStream and Bullet are really more like P2P streaming systems; you can presumably get better efficiency using a bulk swarming system like BitTorrent or Slurpie.
    • Chord and Tapestry (and every other DHT scheme that I have seen) all have problems dealing with host churn. They don't seem really suitable for filesharing systems - instead they are more for large dynamic clusters in a large controlled corporate or academic environment.

      BitTorrent is actually pretty on-par with the current research stuff for swarming file distribution. Everything else seems like incremental improvements - many of which break things like Bittorrents "share and share alike" policy by decen

  • Mirror (Score:4, Funny)

    by XorNand ( 517466 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:22PM (#8742812)


    Just in case... here's a mirror. [rightbrainnetworks.com] Always glad to lend a hand.

  • p2p OS installls (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chaostrophy ( 925 ) <ronaldpottol&gmail,com> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:26PM (#8742842) Homepage Journal
    I'm waiting for boot disks that fire up a peer to peer client for installing your os, and updates. Debian would be a great start, it would hugely reduce the load of the servers. Also Fedora, the BSDs, etc.

    Yes, you can already do bit torrent for the ISO, but that is its own kind of wast and hassle.

    Some day.

  • Speaking of torrents... (Score:3, Funny)

    by crashnbur ( 127738 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:29PM (#8742866)
    SuprNova [suprnova.org], the best torrent web site ever, is going Japanese.

    I swear, this has nothing to do with today's date. :-P

  • I, for one, (Score:4, Funny)

    by JeanBaptiste ( 537955 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:34PM (#8742890)
    am sick of trying to determine the april fool day jokes from the real stories.

  • something better == sftp, or HTTP! (Score:5, Informative)

    by sPaKr ( 116314 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:44PM (#8742937)
    I thought something better was sftp. As for distributions.. why not HTTP? Setup one reflector that dynamically kicks outs redirects as new mirrors come online. This is mutch better as we have a ton of clients already installed (curl,wget,..etc) We also have load balancing, dns round robin, authorzation, security(read: SSL) well defined in the protocol. All we need is a cgi script to kick out the redirects, and another that will make signature files based on the publically available SSL cert. Whamo all the same features.. and we didnt have to reinvent the wheel.

  • Hm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MagiGraphX ( 767644 )
    That's just great! Now the media will consider FTP a movie-stealing method. Then the MPAA will call a ban to all FTP servers!

  • PDTP's Sketchy Liscensing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LoveTheIRS ( 726310 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:55PM (#8742990) Homepage Journal
    I was looking around on the pdtp website. I was thinking everything was fine and dandy until I saw this in the FAQ.

    Question:
    "Skyfire is using a derivative of the Apache License. Doesn't that preclude linking with Qt as the Apache License is incompatible with the GPL?"

    Answer:
    "Qt/X11 is dual licensed under both the GPL and the QPL. The Apache License, while incompatible with the GPL, is not incompatible with the QPL, so when Skyfire is linked with Qt/X11 the terms of the QPL apply. Qt Non-Commercial Edition for Windows has a separate set of license terms which apply to all Windows builds of Skyfire." (emphasis added)

    The FAQ page [sourceforge.net]

    Isn't this license a poor one? Aren't they breaking sourceforge.net rules by using a OSI unapproved license?

    Or maybe I don't know what I am talking about. PLEASE Correct me if I am wrong.

  • You can chuck ftp but.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xot ( 663131 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `htaedeligarf'> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @09:19PM (#8743098) Journal
    The operating systems are not going to chuck ftp so soon and nor are they going to include torrent as a default program.
    I think theres still a while till we ditch ftp and move onto something else completely.Torrents and other p2p stuff is good but only if you take the effort to get them.What about the masses who want to click and go?It won't happen till they can right click and it says "Save torrent as". :-)

  • There's already a solution that covers this. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aminorex ( 141494 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @09:23PM (#8743125) Homepage Journal
    HTTP does all that. There are well-defined
    and well-implemented (Squid) cache-tree protocols
    for HTTP. This is very old stuff. FTP is just
    plain obsolete. It ads *zero* value over HTTP,
    and it's harder to use. Trying to bring FTP up
    to the standards of HTTP is a futile effort too,
    since HTTP is mature on many more dimensions,
    and does not suffer from the gross defects of
    the more primitive FTP such as transmission of
    port numbers as stream data.

    • Re:There's already a solution that covers this. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ComputerSlicer23 ( 516509 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @09:42PM (#8743243)
      Actually, there is one thing that is terrible annoying about HTTP, that I always liked about FTP. You can't ask it to enumerate files. Sure it'll give you a list, but you can't just take all the links. They might have custom headers or footers. So you actually have to parse the stupid thing and extract the pieces and parts you want. Every FTP server and client I have ever seen has a scriptable way to say, grab everything in that directory, put it here. HTTP has no such facility.

      It's virtually trivial to mirror subparts of an FTP site, it's much harder to do that on a Website if it has any links to the parent. Especially because websites specifically aren't a filesystem. So you can't make the same heirical assumptions that you would about an FTP site. It's why I always use rsync mirrors to grab files instead of FTP or HTTP. I hate FTP, it's a stupid protocol. HTTP is nice, but there is always extra crapola that I don't want that is a part of the system (index files, icon images, other gunk). HTTP isn't a filesystem. Now, WebDAV from what I have seen, looks like it could be a real filesystem. HTTP straight up isn't.

      Kirby

    • Re:There's already a solution that covers this. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:49PM (#8743937) Journal
      It ads *zero* value over HTTP,

      HTTP does not do the same things that FTP does.

      HTTP sucks for file transfers, frankly. You need a full-fledged web-browser just to view the index of files on an HTTP server. Not to mention that automatically downloading subdirectories requires serious processing of numerous HTML sub-documents.

      HTTP does not do a good job of:

      handling authentication.

      handling sessions.

      keeping statistics

      limiting connections

      communicating error messages
      Etc, etc, etc.

      does not suffer from the gross defects of the more primitive FTP such as transmission of

      port numbers as stream data.

      Yes, I think everyone will agree that FTP sucks in that regard, but HTTP has it's own drawbacks.

      FTP would disapear quickly if something came along that had all the features of FTP, without the baggage. However, until that something comes along, we are all stuck with FTP.
  • Adelphia.net:

    NO SERVERS OF ANY KIND

    Sorry, I'd like to participate, but I can't. I know it won't die without me, but I fear more broadband ISPs taking on equally moronic TOS. The stance isn't entirely without merit, since Joe 6pak has no business running a server on today's Internet. But there's also no way to prove competence, and even if there were, I'm sure ISPs would be eager to charge me double.

  • cool... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by the_2nd_coming ( 444906 )
    the guy at autopackage.org was attempting something simmilar to this but for package distrobution...it looks like with this protocol, youjust need to set up all the OSS servers with packages on them and boom...you have one huge honkin FTP site with all packages nessisary for all things...then you just ned to download a discription file and then the package manager can grab all the packages from a few PDPT gets and your done...good bye RPM hell.

  • BitTorrent resource-hungry? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Handpaper ( 566373 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @10:57PM (#8743626)
    From the description:
    BitTorrent suffers another problem in that the only usable implementations are currently only available in Python. The primary problem with Python is its excessive resource usage
    Really? I'm currently running four throttled BT downloads on a PII-350 w/64MB. Max CPU usage is 8%, load average 0.25. If you're really that bothered see here [sourceforge.net] for an alternative.
    but other problems arise such as integration of the Python implementation into a native GUI frontend for a given platform
    Ever heard of WxGtk [linux.de]? RPMs for most distros, if it wasn't part of your default install.
    as well as the need to bundle the Python runtime with the BitTorrent client on most platforms as few deployed systems have a Python runtime available
    Now this is just silly. I dont think there is a linux distro which doesn't include Python libraries and even for Windows it's a single small executable. Besides (correct me if I'm wrong) but isn't one of the reasons for using Python that it has bounds-checking on arrays and is therefore proof against the cause of most exploits - the buffer overrun?

  • There's ssh and WebDAV. Both work great, and have significant advantages...
  • The main problem with the "BitTorrent" idea is that it gets associated with "illegal" actions.
    I was on the "Desert Combat" Testers team and we had to download 600-700mb patches once a week... off one ftp server.
    When i mentioned the idea of using a modified BitTorrent client/server to ease the strain on the server i was told we could not use "illegal" tools.

    First educate the public and then start to think about upgrading things to help the internet not crash and burn.

    Phil

  • BT Bandwidth-saved? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Borg_5x8 ( 547287 )
    Hmm, I was thinking about this earlier.. does anyone actually have any statistics for how much server transfer badwidth was saved by distributing a popular file (latest anime release or something) over BitTorrent? How much does it actually help?

  • FTP vs TELNET/SSH (Score:3, Informative)

    by rjch ( 544288 ) on Saturday April 03, 2004 @02:40AM (#8754108) Homepage
    "Isn't it about time we ditched FTP for something better?"

    Yes, it is. However, SSH has been around for a significant time and still hasn't replaced telnet, even given the horrific security holes in telnet.

Slashdot Top Deals

One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.

Close