trouble with up2date

[Dave Roberts]

On Mon, 2003-11-17 at 07:49, Andy Green wrote:
> Centralized distribution bandwidth is a major thing Redhat give us all for 
> free.  It'd be great if there was a Bittorrent-style model for the community 
> reducing that burden on them too, that would ensure 100% availability and no 
> "single point of failure" like the up2date thing.

I was actually thinking about just this same thing the other day. What
if we crossed yum with bittorrent?

That said, I wonder what the bandwidth requirements of running a yum
repository are? Guys like RH have a huge issue with things like people
downloading ISOs. While running a post-install yum repository would take
some amount of bandwidth, it's more incremental bandwidth, with people
downloading new packages and updates. While there is bound to be a surge
right after an update comes out, I'm sure it pales in comparison to a
new set of ISOs. But again, that said, bittorrent just rocks, so it
would be cool if it could be crossed with yum.

For the first time with Fedora, I downloaded my ISOs with bittorrent and
it was fantastic. If you have never used this method before, I highly
recommend it. It used to take me sometimes over 12 hours with a slow ftp
mirror somewhere, if I could even find a mirror that wasn't at its max
ftp users. With bittorrent, all that just goes away. I can start
downloading immediately and I can saturate my cable modem download. I
got all three Fedora ISOs and the two source ISOs in about three hours.

Anyway, do yourself and Red Hat a favor and use bittorrent to download.
Frankly, I'm surprised that Red Hat hasn't pushed this method of
distribution given the obvious advantages for themselves.

-- Dave

-- 
Dave Roberts <ldave at droberts.com>