So that's what UPnP is for!
BitTorrent is a step towards a universal distributed replicating proxying system
as it catches on it will catch on. I wonder when bittorrent proxies will start appearing or will start making sense. Check your local repository before ordering from the source. Check the library before ordering the book from Amazon.
Automatic proxy configuration protocol exists for web browsing, but there is no way to make mozilla go get the PAC file without operator intervention (at least there wasn't three years ago)
i think a bittorrent proxy library, perhaps operated by an upstream ISP, would make sense just like "web page acceleration" which means, the ISP has installed a proxy server makes sense. Technically. Businesswise, installing and supporting dedicated bittorrent servers for the benefit of your users will not make sense until there is demand. And Torrent protocol would need to get extended to support the repository-proxy concept.
I think the big boost to torrent adoption will be when web browsers start accepting files over torrents instead of from single servers, and web distribution links start using an extended syntax that offers the same file as port80 or torrent forms with the machine selecting. I believe HTTP offers such a facility already, torrents appear as urls that start "torrent:" -- no that's wrong, reading the bittorrent publication guide, torrents are magic tarballs that are served from web servers as application/torrent and they are expected to have file extensions of .torrent, and also the "origin" torrent server has to be kept going, and there does not seem to be a way to have the origin be a *TP server of some kind, which would make torrent an accellerant rather than an entirely separate deal.
So there is no way to set up a general purpose bittorrent proxy for use of your natted, firewalled LAN at this time. Allowing insiders to control a shared "downloader" that downloads to a directory that is network-shared would sort of work, and if this product came with bittorrent clients that would refer to it the use would be no less annoying than current bittorent.
I am describing two pieces of software, I haven't made up a name for the system, and I wold not be surprised if it already exists.
"bitGutter" (gutters catch a torrents) would be a torrent downloader that sits on the outside of the firewall or at least works with the firewall so it gets the torrent ports forwarded to it. "Gutter clients" are what you install in your web browser inside the guttered network rather than torrent clients, and the gutter client appears just like the torrent client in terms of user experience, except that you can only download into the shared gutter directory, and in there you can see (or maybe you can't -- privacy issue, resolvable) what your LANmates have already downloaded.
On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 12:58:30 -0500, Gerald Combs [email protected] wrote:
Jason Clinton wrote:
The documentation for BitTorrent clearly states that you must poke a hole in your firewall in order to get the best performance from BitTorrent; any bad experience you've had after doing that should be directed to the author.
Googling for "bittorrent upnp" turns up several clients that will do the hole-poking automagically, assuming your firewall supports UPnP NAT traversal. Most of them appear to be written in something other than Python, which may take care of one of Jonathan's other complaints.