Just had this idea pop up in my mind. Instead of relying on volunteers mirroring package repositories all around the world, why not utilise BitTorrent protocol to move at the very least some some load unto the users and thus increase download speeds as well as decrease latency?
What are you talking about? All that torrent traffic that my ISP sees is definitely Linux ISOs.
Just doing my part
Whatever I’m talking about is not Linux ISOs.
I think they were joking.
Woosh
They were joking about whole other thing. My topic has nothing to do with distro ISOs, I was talking about packages
A “joke” often references material that is related, but not the same.
Uhhh no, judging by the others, people definitely seem to have problem with confusing what I was talking about exactly
Linux ISO is slang for pirated content. They were clearly joking. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Linux+ISO
Dude, I get their joke, but Linux ISOs are irrelevant to the conversation. That’s what I wanted to point out, because many people get confused and think I was talking about them specifically
Ohhhh I thought we were talking about ISOs this whole time! We love these ISOs, don’t we?
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Do you have an example? Or is there a distro that does this by default? I’m pretty new to Linux and have never heard of it before
I think they mean the distro iso/zip download
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Aren’t those the distros? Which one pulls packages using torrent
To add to everything else mentioned, many places (schools, workplaces) don’t allow any usage of BitTorrent, even legal. A guy at my uni got yelled at for torrenting a Linux iso. Not to mention depending on where you live your ISP might be interested in that activity unless you’re using a vpn.
Some distros do this already.
Alternative downloads
There are several other ways to get Ubuntu including torrents, which can potentially mean a quicker download, our network installer for older systems and special configurations and links to our regional mirrors for our older (and newer) releases.
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer download network that sometimes enables higher download speeds and more reliable downloads of large files. You need a BitTorrent client on your computer to enable this download method.
That’s not packages, that’s images. People download images relatively infrequently, but with rolling release distros, people download hundreds of packages on a regular basis
They’re talking about packages you install, not the ISOs.
Ah, oops!
Because HTTP is simpler, faster, easier, more reliable.
The motivation for a a lot of p2p is to make it harder to shut down, but there is no danger of that for Linux distros. The other would be to save money, but Debian/Arch/etc. get more than enough bandwidth/server donations, so they’re not paying for that anyway.
p2p is also cheaper, bandwidth-wise, but packages are usually not that big to justify it.
At least Kali and Arch do
Doesn’t Arch rely on mirrors to distribute packages?
You’re right - I misunderstood the question and thought you meant the distribution images
Metallica ruined it. They made it seem as though torrenting was evil because their content was being downloaded. Poor babies.
Lars ruined Napster. BitTorrent came around some time later after Limewire, Soulseek, and DirectConnect. Lars might have had something to say about Bit Torrent, but by that point no one was listening.
Besides, back then, we really were using BitTorrent mostly for Linux ISOs. At the time it was more reliable than http. It really sucked having to download an entire ISO again because it failed the checksum. BitTorrent alleviated that.
I support this proposal.
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For the longest time people wondered: how do bees fly and don’t bump into each other? There are so many of them!
To find out, people used high speed cameras, and then they were shocked by the fact that bees actually do bump into each other.
Isn’t it ridiculous that we just take our assumptions on something we have no idea about as facts?
Yeah, not my brightest one, that’s for sure. Still, idk about what manu distros everyone is talking about. Big distros utilise volunteer-run mirrors, from what I’ve been able to find.
I suspect if this was enabled by default there would be uproar from people annoyed the distro was stealing their bandwidth, and if it were opt-in then very few people would do it.
Windows Update uses peer to peer to distribute updates. It’s one of the first things I always disabled.
Most common/relevant/larger distros do that at least for the install/live ISO.
OP is taking about packages and updates using peer to peer, not just the install media. AFAIK no distro does that.
Reminds me of the Talk about distributing firmware.
Bittorrent is poorly pretty suspicious which may be used as an argument. But I dont see the reason really.
FWIW the “opposite”, namely Webseed, exists http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html so… maybe some already do but it’s not even noticed because Wedseed of mirrors handle the load?
That’s actually a really interesting idea. Windows even does something, or at a point did something, similar with system updates.
Peer to peer packages would have some privacy, and potential security issues of course but I like the thought
Good lord, and windows doesn’t have a way to verify their ISOs are authentic. Do they sign this p2p payload in any way? Seems like a great opportunity to spread a worm
One reason is privacy and hence security. If you share a package, you also share the information that your system contains the oudtated package “xy” which has a backdoor and can be accessed by a hacker.
I’m not sure if that is a valid argument with atomic image distros since you share the whole image. And the tracker could just disable the old image as soon as the new image arrives.
You could just check the signature
It no more says that than hosting an HTTP mirror currently does.
But as a third party you can not know which clients are using this outdated http mirror. On BitTorrent you can see every participating peers and some of them are probably enduser machines (depending on the actual implementation of OP’s suggestion).
