[Wikireader] updates not working?

Doug Jones dj6mf at frombob.to
Sun Jul 8 03:28:34 CEST 2012


On 07/07/2012 04:13 PM, Alexander Lehner wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 7 Jul 2012, Doug Jones wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> I used the trick mentioned earlier in this thread. I trimmed the
>> ?torrent off of the end of the URL and started downloading the entire
>> file through Firefox. After a few megabytes I paused the download,
>> copied the partial file into the download folder used by my bittorrent
>> client, and told it to torrent that file. It contacted the tracker at
>> amazon, which is indeed working, and the tracker found one peer (you),
>> and sent you those megabytes.
>>
>> So the amazon tracker is working. And the file is indeed present on
>> the amazon server. But the amazon tracker isn't using the amazon
>> server as a seeder!
>>
>> So something is still wrong.
>
> I now managed to download the zip files and seeding them now (for depedia).
> Il will seed others also, in the hope, that the torrent network comes
> back to live.
>
> Off-topic soon, how-to:
> I used azureus/vuze.
> First downloaded the depedia*.7z files (as described earlier, without
> .torrent).
> Copied them into my torrent download folder.
> Asked vuze to download the torrent 'depedia*.7z.torrent' from the
> http://dev.thewikireader.com/language-packs/
> page.
>
> Got warning to continue/restart download, acknowledged that.
> Started to seed then...
>
> ---
>
> Just wondering:
> I was downloading the files from web with approx. 600kB.
> This is much faster than any torrent network will provide and faster
> than most other download sites.
>
> Who - if ever - will have to pay for this download speed?
> Does it make sense at all here, to use torrent network to distribute
> such kind of data?
>
> A.
>


I assume that Openmoko is paying for the bits downloaded from that 
Amazon server.  Of course, when we ask our bittorrent clients to 
download and seed the files, Amazon doesn't see the traffic going 
between other peers so Openmoko doesn't pay for that part.  This is part 
of the reason we use bittorrent  --  we are volunteering to take some of 
the bandwidth load ourselves instead of asking some centralized server 
to cover all those costs.

Another reason for using bittorrent is this:  Suppose a group of peers 
already have, between them, a complete copy of a given file.  (No one 
peer needs to have all of the chunks;  each chunk just needs to be on at 
least one peer in the group.)  Then we just need to get a copy of the 
corresponding .torrent file to each peer, by whatever means, and then 
the peers can collectively act to build a complete copy of the big file 
on each peer.  No centralized tracker is needed, as long as the peers 
can find each other.  This brings the fully decentralized robustness of 
the Internet to torrent distribution.  (Okay, DNS isn't fully 
decentralized yet, but that's another story...)  This is what Tribler 
does.  It allows peers to find each other without a tracker.  I expect 
all bittorrent clients will eventually gain this capability.

As to the question of whether bittorrent makes much sense for these 
particular files:  That's a good question.

If you have a bunch of peers, and one of them can pump out data at 
600kBps and the others are much slower, then the fast one will 
presumably hand out most of the chunks and the slower ones won't do much 
at all.  If the fast server is worried about cost, then it could 
throttle itself down when there are other peers seeding.  But throttling 
itself down to zero (effectively that's what's happening now) is also 
undesirable, especially if the other peers don't have a complete copy 
between them yet  ;-)



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