[WBEL-users] Bittorrent seeds

[Johnny Hughes]

All,

If you are like me, you are very happy to have a product like WhiteBox
Linux available...and if you are the average user, you might also be
wondering what you can do to help the project.

John Morris has the building and updates under control, but there is one
thing that we can do to help out (those of us with broadband)...and that
is to be a bittorrent seed for other users to download from.

If you have the iso's on your harddrive and already have bittorrent on
your system, it is easy to make yourself a seed.  

The biggest problem with being a seed is that if all your outgoing
bandwidth is used, your internet browsing and downloading can become
slow.  (This can easily happen if you use the GUI bittorent clinet and
don't pass in any upload limits ... but in Linux, you can use the
command line switch (where xx is the max limit in KB/sec you want to
upload):

--max_upload_rate xx

This will allow you to pick a number (like 50% of your upload capacity)
which will let you upload, but have a minimal effect on your web
browsing and other internet activites.

Here are 2 scenarios:

1.  You downloaded the ISOs via bittorrent and still have the
final-bins-fixed directory with the ISOs in it ...

this is very easy ... go to the directory that is just above
final-bins-fixed (where you saved it when you downloaded, in my case
/tmp .. it may be your home directory).  Issue this command (it is a
single line):

btdownloadcurses.py -max_upload_rate 32 
http://whiteboxlinux.org/liberation-final-bins-good.torrent

(I use 30 because I have a 4000/512 kbs line ... which is 500/64 KB/sec
(divide both by 8 to convert bits to bytes) and 32 is half of 64 ... if
you have a 1024/128 line you would take 128/8 .. so your upload line
capacity is 16 KB/Sec ... so you could probably use 8 as your max upload
rate instead of 32).  10 people doing this adds 80 KB/sec to the
download capacity.

2. This scenario is that you have the ISOs but you didn't get them from
bittorrent ... but you have and use bittorrent.  In this case, you need
to create a directory named:

final-bins-fixed

and put the 3 ISOs in there ... then go to the directory that is one
level above the final-bins-fixed directory and follow the above
directions for scenario 1.

You could use the GUI bittorent client if you want (the command I gave
is the curses client (it works without X) ... if you would rather have
the GUI, use btdownloadgui.py instead of btdownloadcurses.py

Right now, I am uploading at the limit that I set ... and the bittorrent
link has 6 seeds (sources) and 10 leeches (downloads) ... the downloads
would go alot faster if more people would help!

--Johnny Hughes