Hi,

I have seen that BitTorrent is not working currently. I might have an easy way to make it work.

BitTorrent has a not very well known feature : local peer discovery. With local peer discovery and webseeding, you don’t even need a tracker server.

Here is how I use it to distribute large files on my network.

I have a web server which host the file (big.iso here) and a metalink file like this :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <metalink version="3.0" xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org/">
   <files>
     <file name="big.iso">
       <resources>
         <url type="http">http://file-server/big.iso</url>
         <url type="bittorrent">http://file-server/big.iso.torrent</url>
       </resources>
     </file>
   </files>
 </metalink>

on the clients I run

aria2c.exe --bt-enable-lpd=true --enable-dht=false --bt-exclude-tracker='*' --seed-time=0  http://file-server/big.iso.metalink

I create the torrent file and metalink file with a these bash functions :

function mk_torrent {
   print_info "Creating torrent file for $1"
   transmission-create "$1"
   chmod a+r "$1.torrent"
}

function mk_metalink {
   file_url="$REPO/$1"
   torrent_url="$REPO/$1.torrent"

   print_info "Checking URLs"
   wget --spider "$file_url" "$torrent_url" || \
       ( print_error "Can't access file(s) via HTTP." && exit 1 )

   print_info "Creating metalink file for $1"
   cat > "$1.metalink" <<EOL
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<metalink version="3.0" xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org/">
  <files>
    <file name="$1">
      <resources>
        <url type="http">$REPO/$1</url>
        <url type="bittorrent">$REPO/$1.torrent</url>
      </resources>
    </file>
  </files>
</metalink>
EOL
}

I’m not a FOG user (yet) and I don’t know how easy it would be to implement this. I hope it helps anyway.