Videos of Ruby Conference

[Bill Guindon]

What are the reasons people do not use bittorrent?

fear of having to learn a new tech
lack of knowledge/experience
lack of time to find/learn about new tech
lack of machine resources (ok, that's a pretty 'old' answer)

at one time or another, I've suffered from combinations of the above.
by random chance, I've recently installed a BT app, so this isn't one
of those cases

 

[Aredridel]

Does anyone have, or know of, snake-simple instructions on how to host

large files in a public server, making them available only through
bittorrent.

I poked around, and can see how to make a torrent file, and then get
that torrent file to a tracker, but I gather from this that the target
file is expected to be available form my PC, and only when I run a
bittorrent client. I want to serve the files form ruby-doc.org, not my
home box.

On the ruby-doc.org server, you would upload the file and its
corresponding torrent to a private area, then run
btdownloadheadless.py on the torrent file.

There also has to be a tracker involved, which should also probably
run on the ruby-doc.org server.

I use screen or its simple incarnation, dtach, to run bittorrent
downloads (and uploads; they are the same thing)

Ari

 

[Tom Copeland]

But I thought it was a server-side issue, am I wrong? Shouldn't anyone
be able to access a file served vis BT?

Yup, all you need is a BT client, i.e., Azureus:

http://azureus.sf.net/

Yours,

Tom

 

[Tom Copeland]

Does anyone have, or know of, snake-simple instructions on how to host
large files in a public server, making them available only through
bittorrent.

I followed the docs in the Python BT implementation
(http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html), and there's a guide
to it here:

http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/guide.html

I poked around, and can see how to make a torrent file, and then get
that torrent file to a tracker, but I gather from this that the target
file is expected to be available form my PC, and only when I run a
bittorrent client. I want to serve the files form ruby-doc.org, not my
home box.

Yup, per Ari's email, you can run a BT peer on ruby-doc.org itself.

I expect that I will need to run a tracker on the server hosting the
files. Is this what RubyForge does?

Yup, right on. I suppose you could simply use RubyForge's tracker; that
should work, I think.

This is off-topic for Ruby in general, but handy info as large
Ruby-related files become available.

BT is good stuff. Ikkei and I are working on a BT Ruby library here -
http://aversa.rubyforge.org/ - so look for more BT jibber-jabber in the
future.

Yours,

Tom

 

[Tom Copeland]

On the ruby-doc.org server, you would upload the file and its
corresponding torrent to a private area, then run
btdownloadheadless.py on the torrent file.

Right on. For the RubyForge torrents (http://bt.rubyforge.org/), I run
a client on a computer on my home network (connected via DSL). So far -
in about two weeks - my home network has uploaded about 350 MB of
traffic in Ruby torrents. This is good, since that's traffic that
didn't clog up the RubyForge pipes.

Yours,

Tom

 

[Chris Morris]

What are the reasons people do not use bittorrent?

One potential reason is losing seeders in the 'cloud' once something
has been going for a while. On some music related bittorrent sites
there's usually never a shortage of posts like "Can someone seed? I'm
stuck at 97%"

 

[Curt Hibbs]

Right on. For the RubyForge torrents (http://bt.rubyforge.org/), I run
a client on a computer on my home network (connected via DSL). So far -
in about two weeks - my home network has uploaded about 350 MB of
traffic in Ruby torrents. This is good, since that's traffic that
didn't clog up the RubyForge pipes.

Please excuse my ignorance as I know next-to-nothing about BT...

If I installed the BT client you recommended on the server on my hom network
(also DSL), is that all I need to do? Or do I also need to use that client
to download the files that I want to help serve?

Thanks,
Curt

 

[Tom Copeland]

One potential reason is losing seeders in the 'cloud' once something
has been going for a while. On some music related bittorrent sites
there's usually never a shortage of posts like "Can someone seed? I'm
stuck at 97%"

Yup. Hopefully a few folks could keep Ruby-related seeds running most
of the time. Anyone who's got a home DSL or cable modem could share a
few megs a day... shouldn't be too burdensome since most BT clients
allow you to regulate how much data goes out...

Tom

 

[Bil Kleb]

fear of having to learn a new tech
lack of knowledge/experience
lack of time to find/learn about new tech
lack of machine resources (ok, that's a pretty 'old' answer)

at one time or another, I've suffered from combinations of the above.

I have termed this "aggressive incompetence" based on some comments made
by one of the Dave Thomases a couple years ago in the XP mailing list,

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/55146
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/55217

I have found the phrase to be extremely provocative, powerful, and
motivating.

Regards,

 

[Tom Copeland]

Please excuse my ignorance as I know next-to-nothing about BT...

Not at all; I'm just figuring it out myself very recently.

If I installed the BT client you recommended on the server on my hom network
(also DSL), is that all I need to do? Or do I also need to use that client
to download the files that I want to help serve?

Good questions - I've added some notes here:

http://bt.rubyforge.org/

to outline the setup procedures. Does that all make sense?

Thanks,

Tom

 

[Tom Copeland]

[...] in the XP mailing list,

I've noticed a fair bit of overlap between the Ruby and XP lists.
Coincidence? I think not...

Yours,

Tom

 

[Curt Hibbs]

Not at all; I'm just figuring it out myself very recently.


Good questions - I've added some notes here:

http://bt.rubyforge.org/

to outline the setup procedures. Does that all make sense?

Thanks, Tom -- that answered all my questions.

Curt

 

[Aredridel]

Yup. Hopefully a few folks could keep Ruby-related seeds running most

of the time. Anyone who's got a home DSL or cable modem could share a
few megs a day... shouldn't be too burdensome since most BT clients
allow you to regulate how much data goes out...

Or just keep a seed going on the servers -- the server should, in
theory, never need to send the data more than once at a time, so Bit
Torrent is effectively poor man's multicast.

Some trackers also have the ability to "shield" some peers, only
opening them to transfer if no other client has that chunk. That's
probably the optimal way to do it.

 

[Bill Guindon]

I have termed this "aggressive incompetence" based on some comments made
by one of the Dave Thomases a couple years ago in the XP mailing list,

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/55146
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/55217

I have found the phrase to be extremely provocative, powerful, and
motivating.

There's definitely some truth to that. Sometimes it's the simple
belief "the more I know, the more the boss will make me do", even when
there's no truth to it.

I suffer from that one to this day. My boss is a major a**hole at
times. Of course, that comes with the territory of being self
employed

and sometimes... it's a simple case of overestimating the problem, or
underestimating your abilities.

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

Gavin Sinclair wrote:

That being the case, is it possible to try and get plain audio
recordings as well? I mean, shoot for video, but someone else can be
recording audio, which will be better than nothing if the video
doesn't turn out well.

Plus the two two can be muxed (is that the right word?) [...]

If you're from New Zealand

Gavin

Hehe.

And if you're from Australia, is it "meexed"?

(I knew a math grad student from NZ who said that 6 is pronounced
"seeks" in Australia, but "sucks" in NZ.)

 

[Carl Youngblood]

Almost invariably for me the problem is firewalling. Opening all of
those ports is usually difficult or impossible to get your network
admin to do. At home I often have a situation where I'm roaming
around the house with a laptop on a wireless DHCP connection, so
setting up port forwarding to go to my dynamic IP is impractical.

 

[Tom Copeland]

Almost invariably for me the problem is firewalling. Opening all of
those ports is usually difficult or impossible to get your network
admin to do. At home I often have a situation where I'm roaming
around the house with a laptop on a wireless DHCP connection, so
setting up port forwarding to go to my dynamic IP is impractical.

True, although in both these situations you can leave the BT client
running and it'll connect to folks who have port 6881 open. I've shared
about 10 GB of the Fedora ISO images in the few weeks by doing that...

Yours,

Tom

 

[James Britt]

One potential reason is losing seeders in the 'cloud' once something
has been going for a while. On some music related bittorrent sites
there's usually never a shortage of posts like "Can someone seed? I'm
stuck at 97%"

Um, what does this mean in English?

Assuming that the file is served from the same machine as a tracker and
the torrent file, is this a problem?


Thanks,


James

 

[James Britt]

Good questions - I've added some notes here:

http://bt.rubyforge.org/

Tom, you are the greatest.


James

 

[Chad Fowler]

Tom, you are the greatest.

Tom, what do you think about adding an RSS feed showing new torrents
at some point? I'm sure I'll forget to go check for them, but I would
definitely subscribe to it in my aggregator.

Chad