[WBEL-devel] Curious thing with the bittorrents...

[Charles Lacour]

On Saturday 20 December 2003 13:39, Jamey Fletcher wrote:
> I just downloaded, a few mins ago, the linuxlobbyist .torrent file, and
> started a client - and let it go through the original files - I'm using
> the BT3.3 btdownloadcurses.py client - and it reported no errors...  But
> then it immediately bailed out reporting permissions error - which sounds
> like it may have tried to write to the files - which I would suspect might
> mean the client doesn't actually report errors when it says "verifying the
> downloaded files".

No, it shouldn't report errors, from what I understand of it. It just treats 
anything that doesn't match as a bad block that needs to be re-recieved. It 
doesn't really understand the concept of "I've already got a good file." It 
treats a full-sized file, with or without bad blocks, just like a partial 
file. It compares what it has to the hash, and goes to get any blocks that 
mismatch.

> I *really* need to see what else is out there for the bittorrent world...
> And perhaps write some documentation...  *sigh*  I love how, when you use
> the gui download client, without any parameters, the help box runs right
> off the top & bottom of the screen.  Scroll bars, anyone?
>
> As it stands, the .torrent files on the download page are feeding out
> straight from the whitebox server the ISOs residing there.  But people
> reporting better results from the linuxlobbyist torrent - I say, go for
> it.

I posted a long (TOO long, the list set it aside for a moderator to look at) 
analysis of what I _think_ is wrong with the current torrent. The hash for 
one of the blocks is wrong. The ISOs are right, I'm pretty sure, but for 
something somewhere in disc 2, there's a bad hash. Since the 256K block in 
the ISO image is good, but the hash is bad, everybody gets everything else 
and then tries over and over to refetch that one block. Since the only thing 
that feeds the torrent from the original machine is another client, there's 
nothing that ever considers itself definitive and says "Hey, there's 
something not right here!".

If you have access to the machine, remake the .torrent file. Compare it to 
Paul Iadinisi's with "torrenttool -a -v" and diff. Dates and times and URLs 
might mismatch, but the "fields" sections should be identical. Once we have a 
good .torrent file out there, I think the 50 or so "leeches" will rapidly 
turn into "seeds".