Dare I ask the question?

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2004-10-29 at 04:51, James McKenzie wrote:
> I think that the Torrent is great for large software releases, such as 
> Fedora Core or OpenOffice, as it spreads the stress across the network 
> and I think that Fedora Core 2 was on the torrent about a week after 
> release.

Torrents for the FC3 test releases were available at
http://torrent.linux.duke.edu/ from mid-afternoon UTC (i.e. in the
morning US time) on their official release dates. I expect the same to
be true of the FC3 final release on 8th November. For me, BitTorrent is
not only faster than an ftp/http download but also more reliable, since
each chunk of 1MB or so gets CRC checked as soon as it is downloaded, so
there's never a worry about getting a bad download, as long as the
original source of the torrent can be trusted, which in duke.edu's case
is a pretty safe assumption.

> I usually get the original release after a few folks have 
> retrieved it and installed

Sound advice; let other people find the nasty problems ;-)

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>