Law Students

automatically ?mirroring? distro torrents?

By Luis

So… I was having a discussion with a copyright classmate about the legitimate uses of bittorrent, explaining that (like any good protocol) torrent can be used to transfer both legal and illegal bits.

screenshot by dantekgeek, used under CC-SA

It struck me that many would probably be able to spare disk space for a pile of iso and some upload. (I certainly can.) But there is no way, that I can see, to automatically ‘mirror’ the torrents of the major distros- all the torrent pages seem to assume that you just grab a single iso that you need, and then leave your client running; no information on automatically grabbing new torrents; shutting down old ones; etc. It seems like there are many people who could be talked into more pro-active mirroring if there were a scriptable way to do that, like the elaborate mirror scripts that already exist for ftp/http.

Do such scripts exist for torrent? I’d like to use some of them if they do :)

[Long term, without having given it much thought, this also seems like a good idea for rpms/debs; yes, there is some overhead for smaller files, but using a protocol that automatically load-balances and mirrors seems like it would be a good idea. It took me a full year on columbia campus before I noticed that I had a local mirror; I like the idea of using a protocol that would figure that out for me, and automatically allow me to help out/participate as well. But like I said, I haven’t given this much thought.]

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on December 19, 2007 (boomark / email).