Online games stealing your bandwidth

Sun Sep 26 07:50:27 UTC 2010

On Sun, 2010-09-26 at 07:47 +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> I don't recall any protocols being standard.
> 
> Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke
> and mirrors. 
> 
> 
> Adrian

Less smoky is the relatively common practice (at least in Europe) of
tech-friendly ISPs running bittorrent for "release days" of Linux and
BSD distros; Ubuntu releases especially because they have a large
proportion of release-day installs (!) and the servers get hit hard. 

How much of this is just staff doing their customers a favor is
debateable, but I know two places where it's written into SOPs for
Debian and FreeBSD major releases (about a week or two after the
release). Linux distribution by bittorrent is sometimes harder now that
more Tier 1 ISPs block or inspect the P2P traffic
By a bit of quick fiddling you can ensure that users outside your blocks
don't get served.  
I'm talking installation ISOs, not the ports or packages - the rsyncs
and mirrors take care of that as normal.

For the Debian 5.05 release I provided 700GB+ in a week for the x86
Gnome CD alone via BT, the AMD64 CD was about twice that, yet most of
the Debian stuff will be done using Jigdo, so that's a fraction of the
actual traffic. The Debian Netboot CD's seem quite popular too but
especially for exotic hardware archs. The 5.06 release is still flowing
nicely.

The last few FreeBSD releases I've pushed 500GB each time though I hold
them open for much longer for the less popular architectures.

The thought of it all flying round in such long circles dismays me
somewhat. There's probably an reasonable argument for temporary ISP-BT
of this stuff, as it'll save us all a tiny bit of peak and a lot of
packets, all for very little kit, space and man-hours.

The rest of the torrent users, (games or copytheft), can surely
be /dev/null-ed ?  :) Hmm, can I smell burning torches in the distance?

Gord
--
# Hahaha, hehehe, I'm a little Gnome and I hate KDE