[ NNSquad ] Re: [OT?] NN definition(s?)

["Nick Weaver" <nweaver@gmail.com>]

> Forging packets and sending RST's is bad.  The use of a new
> technology such as P2P in and of itself is not.  I had to FTP
> Fedora 8 from usf.edu just yesterday because I'm on ComCast and I
> got a whopping 4K download speed with bittorrent.  I've never
> used it for any illegal activity, and actually just installed it
> specifically do download Fedora.  Does this tick me off?  You
> bet.  Do the complaints from some ISP's alleviate the issue, or
> relieve my distress, heck no.  So what did I do?  I nailed up a
> bunch of FTP sessions to download not only the Fedora 8 install
> DVD, but also the recovery CD and all of the "spins" that I could
> get a hand on.  Instead of allowing the torrent, for which I
> would have been happy with a 200K or so download speed, ComCast
> blocked it, and resulted in 4 consecutive FTP's at 200K each.
> You go ComCast!  Great traffic engineering there!

This is not comcast's doing.

a)  Comcast is only shaping seeders to public knowledge, that is, the
case where a comcast peer is only transmitting data, not receiving
(using some crude heuristics it appears, because of the blocking of
other traffic.)

b)  I've tried using BitTorrent for Fedora ISOs on an unshaped, 100
Mbps pipe (ICSI to UC Berkeley to the Internet), and gotten absolutely
the same dismal performance.  So it's not comcast's fault that
BitTorrent is not good for not-currently super popular Linux ISOs.


BitTorrent works when you have popular, large files, such as the
latest pirated movie or a 100 MB update for World of Warcraft.  It is
very poor for small-interest files such as Linux ISO images which have
been out for a while, so only a coulpe people want them at any point
in time.


But BitTorrent for such large, high-popularity files, IF applied
correctly, helps the ISPs because you can contain a lot of traffic
internally.  But there needs to be a way for peers to find "network
close" peers, which I don't know if the protocol currently includes.

Likewise, ISPs would benefit greatly from Torrent caches, except the
copyright headaches would preclude this.