towards bittorrent proxying (was Re: Bittorrent)

[David Nicol]

So that's what UPnP is for!  

BitTorrent is a step towards a
universal distributed replicating proxying system

as it catches on it will catch on.  I wonder when bittorrent proxies
will start appearing or will start making sense.  Check your local repository
before ordering from the source.  Check the library before ordering the book
from Amazon.  

Automatic proxy configuration protocol exists for web browsing, but there is
no way to make mozilla go get the PAC file without operator intervention
(at least there wasn't three years ago)

i think a bittorrent proxy library, perhaps operated by an upstream ISP, would
make sense just like "web page acceleration" which means, the ISP has
installed a proxy server makes sense.  Technically.  Businesswise, installing
and supporting dedicated bittorrent servers for the benefit of your users will
not make sense until there is demand.  And Torrent protocol would need to
get extended to support the repository-proxy concept.

I think the big boost to torrent adoption will be when web browsers
start accepting
files over torrents instead of from single servers, and web
distribution links start
using an extended syntax that offers the same file as port80 or
torrent forms with
the machine selecting.  I believe HTTP offers such a facility already,
torrents appear
as urls that start "torrent:"  -- no that's wrong, reading the
bittorrent publication guide,
torrents are magic tarballs that are served from web servers as
application/torrent
and they are expected to have file extensions of .torrent, and also
the "origin" torrent
server has to be kept going, and there does not seem to be a way to
have the origin
be a *TP server of some kind, which would make torrent an accellerant
rather than
an entirely separate deal.

So there is no way to set up a general purpose bittorrent proxy for
use of your natted,
firewalled LAN at this time.  Allowing insiders to control a shared
"downloader" that
downloads to a directory that is network-shared would sort of work,
and if this product
came with bittorrent clients that would refer to it the use would be
no less annoying
than current bittorent.

I am describing two pieces of software, I haven't made up a name for
the system, and
I wold not be surprised if it already exists.

"bitGutter"  (gutters catch a torrents) would be a torrent downloader
that sits on
the outside of the firewall or at least works with the firewall so it
gets the torrent ports
forwarded to it.  "Gutter clients" are what you install in your web
browser inside the
guttered network rather than torrent clients, and the gutter client
appears just like
the torrent client in terms of user experience, except that you can
only download into
the shared gutter directory, and in there you can see (or maybe you
can't -- privacy
issue, resolvable) what your LANmates have already downloaded.



On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 12:58:30 -0500, Gerald Combs <gerald at ethereal.com> wrote:
> Jason Clinton wrote:
> 
> > The documentation for BitTorrent clearly states that you must poke a
> > hole in your firewall in order to get the best performance from
> > BitTorrent; any bad experience you've had after doing that should be
> > directed to the author.
> 
> Googling for "bittorrent upnp" turns up several clients that will do the
> hole-poking automagically, assuming your firewall supports UPnP NAT
> traversal.  Most of them appear to be written in something other than
> Python, which may take care of one of Jonathan's other complaints.

-- 
David L Nicol
"Valuable ideas can withstand scrutiny" -- authors of /XP Explained/