[TriLUG] doing my first debian installation

[Michael Alan Dorman]

"Douglas Ward" <dward at nccumc.org> writes:
> I have both the server space and bandwidth available.  Any good
> walkthroughs on how to set up a torrent stream?

Oh, duh, yeah, that would be a smart thing for me to do if I'm going
to suggest everyone do it. :)

It's really easy, once you have the bits installed.  I use bittornado.
Honesty forces me to admit my ignorance of the exact relationship
between bittornado and the original bittorrent software.  Vanilla
bittorrent software is almost certainly similar, if not exactly the
same.

The process is actually really simple.

  login as unpriveleged user

  start screen

  mkdir ~/torrent

  btlaunchmanycurses ~/torrent --max_upload_rate 50 --max_download_rate 5

I recommend using screen because none of the torrent clients I've seen
are real daemons---though I haven't looked recently, either; I'd love
to hear if someone runs across one.  The two-line introduction is:

  Use Ctrl-a d to detatch
  Use screen -r to reattach

That said, there's lots of other cool stuff you can do with screen,
it's definitely worth becoming familiar with.

The directory name is arbitrary, albeit obvious.  It will end up
containing copies of the stuff you are making available, so make sure
it's on an appropriately-sized partition.

Oh, and the rate parameters are in Kb/s.  Be aware that while the
upload_rate is an overall limit, the download_rate is applied to each
individual download going on---which is why I have it cranked so low,
because bittorrent will happily saturate your connection, and when I
was pulling all 14 Debian CD images, it did exactly that.

Then, as you find torrents you'd like to serve, download their
.torrent files to ~/torrent:

  cd ~/torrent && wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r0a/i386/bt-cd/debian-31r0a-i386-businesscard.iso.torrent

btlaunchmanycurses will automatically notice the new .torrent file
after a minute or two and start pulling content.  You can stop the
program just by hitting 'q' (there may be other interesting keys, I
have to admit I haven't investigated, well, at all).

Err, that's really just about it.  Obviously I had to do some
reasearch and observing on the bandwidth issues, but in general it has
been sufficiently easy that I've actually managed to remain pretty
ignorant about the whole business.

Mike
-- 
You're such a delicate boy -- Garbage