[GLLUG] Broadband/cable provider [OT]

[Matthew Walster]

On 6 March 2013 13:22, Hearns, John <john.hearns at mclaren.com> wrote:

> BitTorrent is used to provision compute node images in big Beowulf
> clusters,
>

Beowulf? Is it 1999 again? ;)

Seriously though, yes -- there are good reasons to use BitTorrent. My
original argument was that people use "downloading legal Linux ISOs" as a
synonym for "leeching movies, TV and music for free". BitTorrent is a
*terrible* protocol for distributing content. It's great for the source,
but terrible for the network.


> as it can scale very well. You want to be able to move around images of
> diskless nodes and update them.
> (In fact the Oscar toolkit has three modes - rsync, bit-torrent and
> flamethrower which uses multicast)
>

Indeed - multicast is fantastic (yet not really commonplace on the
internet) and there are protocols that take into account the network design
(such as http.debian.net etc) but for the most part the best way of getting
a decent speed on your downloads (Linux package wise) is to run netselect
and choose some close mirrors. Enterprise environments are very different.

M
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