[Xastir] torrents and xastir

[Tom Hayward]

> Imagine a site with a CONUS map (to start, and thinking small; we could
> scale up) where you can use a bounding box to identify your region of
> interest or cursor to select a particular point (map).  After that selection
> you see an inventory of different maps and types of maps available, and you
> use a check-list to identify the ones you want.  The site prepares a
> separate page/Torrent stream to provide these, and the page is lightly
> persistent (days before it ages out) and indexed on a page of recent
> selections.
>
> You'd have the option of getting the data via download or Torrent at that
> point.  Simplified data delivery.
>
> I'm not sure how making delivery of all those maps via Torrent can be done
> without some form of simplified selection, but then I'm not a big Torrent
> user.  I tend to get OS distro's and kernel updates that way, at home,
> because it "just happens" and I don't have to worry much about it.  This
> doesn't make me an expert, though, as I got it working once and locked in
> the format.

This is a neat idea. I need to do the same thing with a repository of
JPEG images (from a time-lapse sequence) at work. I haven't decided
how to attack it yet. I need to distribute a collection of files, but
I don't want to create an archive (zip/tar/rar) every time a
collection is requested (mostly, because the data is in Amazon S3 and
I'd have to move it before I could create an archive). Collections are
divided by user query such as time-of-day with date bounds (i.e. every
10am shot during the month of July).

Anyway, I don't think this takes advantage of the distributed model of
BitTorrent, although you would see benefit from BT's simple
distribution of multiple files. I think everyone would want different
chunks, so every torrent the server created would only have one peer.
The index of recent selections would help here, but I'm not sure by
how much.

Tom KD7LXL