[Xastir] torrents and xastir

[Gerry Creager]

<opinion>P2P excels when there's a lot of consumers, and you start with 
one server.  If, however, each subscribers becomes a server (publisher) 
upon receipt, per-server bandwidth limitations, and system load, are 
mitigated.

For some small value of convenience, too, a user can start a Torrent 
stream and come back to a whole file.  When you're talking movies or 
songs... or TIGER datasets, this can be useful.

We have some folks who don't have a lot of bandwidth, so a Torrent might 
be useful to them to retrieve stuff, but that's speculation.  Overall, 
repositories in the conventional sense might be better/easier to maintain.
</opinion>

Jason KG4WSV wrote:
> I'm not terribly familiar with bit torrent, so forgive me if these are
> novice questions, but I'm trying to understand if and how we (xastir
> and APRS users) can benefit from the distribution system in the
> sharing of our sometimes large chunks of data, like maps and VM
> images.
> 
> The basic premise/assumption is that many people will want to download
> and many of those will make the data once they have downloaded, right?
>  If no one peering, there is nothing to download?  I guess it degrades
> to a traditional master-client download if there's only 1 "peer".
> 
> I'm trying to figure out if it's worth the effort, given our
> relatively small numbers, to make things like VM images, TIGER
> shapefiles, DRGs, DOQQs, etc available via bit torrent.
> 

-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.862.3982 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843