[WBEL-devel] Stuck BT

[clacour@clacour.com]

> On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 10:25:02AM -1000, h.stilmack@jach.hawaii.edu
> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> I've seen the same "stuck" BT behaviour, too - and my .iso #3 is also
>> screwed up. Apologies to anyone who has tried to download it - I'm
>> doing a manual rsync now, and will restart a torrent seed as soon as I
>> have everything right.
>
>   This is extremely odd.  I suggest we etch these bits in stone and send
> them off to Bram Cohen for a look-see.  Don't know if this is 100%
> reproducable, but I'm going to try to see if I can reproduce it
> reliably. It'll take some time, but I'm going to use BT to transfer to
> another site, delete them, and try again a few times this weekend to see
> if it's consistent.

I've been doing a little research on BitTorrent. I'm not done yet, nor
have I talked to anybody who actually knows the thing well, so take this
with a grain of salt:

>From what I've read, the checksums on the individual blocks is calculated
when the tracker is started, and stored in the .torrent file.

If the tracker was started a little early, and read the file while it was
still being written to, that might explain the behavior we've seen.

I still don't understand why a bad file would compare successfully against
a good one.

By the way, my apologies to all for all the gar-baj I sent earlier. I'm
looking at stuff through SquirrelMail today, and the squirrel appears to
have eaten a few magic mushrooms by accident.