bitTorrent in a corporate environment / replacement 4 rsync

[ruizs]

Hi All -

not sure if this is the best place to post this, but thought I'd give it a try.

Trying to figure out a better way to distribute files here. We currently have a star architecture, with one main site pushing data to approx 15 sites worldwide. We probably push out 20-200GB daily, depending on the number of changes.

In trying to move away from a star architecture and better utilize our availlable bandwidth worldwide, bitTorrent sounds like a great technology. However, most of the use I've seen is for public file sharing. Anybody know of someone who's done this already, documentation, etc? Other ideas?

thanks!

[useperl]

While this idea certainly has merits, some sites have firewalls that specifically block p2p (yes even BT) without any chance of ever changing that policy.

Currently we deploy roughly 2 - 3 gentoo based systems a month. Each requiring a scheduled opening of rsync each time. I'm more keen to possibly using SSH instead of the rsync protocol to download portage.

--useperl

[dsf]

Why not use rsync over ssh? Best of both worlds.

Before rsync 2.6.0, you had to use 'rsync --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh <any flags>', but starting with 2.6.0, it defaults to using ssh.

You can set up a passphrase-less identity file and use, e.g.:

'rsync --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/someidentity' <rsync flags> ...'

Benefit is, you get to use rsync's synchronization features while distributing files over a secure channel that presumably doesn't require ACL opening.

Also, you may also benefit by deploying a local Gentoo mirror and pointing all your Gentoo boxes to it via appropriate make.conf entries; that allows you to better control access for rsync/ssh as well as get better transfer times, while decreasing the load on the Internet-based Gentoo mirrors.

[useperl]

That's exactly my point. Portage should default to SSH as the transport. Is this supported by any of the mirrors?

--useperl

[anderiv]

[useperl]

However, no firewall I know of blocks outgoing SSH.

If the mirrors are going to be terribly inconvienced by SSH as a transport..........

erm

--useperl

[Jengu]

The mirrors could be setup to use blowfish (can use with the -c cml arg), which is much faster than what ssh defaults to (rsa). Not sure if this would still stress the servers though.

Back on topic -- I remember slashdot covering a story awhile back of people demonstrating legitimate use of bittorrent technology by using it to distribute a video from congress. May want to search back through their news.

That said, kludging something like this I don't think would be too hard given the plethora of command line torrent clients for linux. Use existing rsync to distribute the .torrent file, and then have all the client machines start downloading it.

[anderiv]

[G.N.A.]

Just so you know, the update system for World of Warcraft uses bittorrent to distribute updates.

So now you have at least one example of a commercial package using bittorrent.

GNA

[ruizs]

This was more for internal data and tools, not for doing OS updates like w/ portage. We're a fabless semiconductor company, so the things we push around are tools (synopsys, magma, etc) and libraries (std. cells, design kits, etc.), which get pretty large sometimes.

Network/firewall is not an issue, we own the network pipes, firewalls, etc., and security isn't so much of an issue, as all our network links are private VPN's. This would be completely internal, no outside access here (we would, and probably do, block all p2p ports at the corporate gateway).

The problem we're trying to solve, illustrated by an example:
We have a /tools/ directory that is common across our environments (solaris, linux, etc) and sites (worldwide). To acheive this, we do a nightly rsync for each architecture, pushing from our main site out to 15 sites worldwide.
Instead of using 1 site (and taking all the bandwidth for the central site) to push to 15 others, how do we harness the power of bittorrent to distribute the network load among all our sites?

I like Jengu's idea, using rsync to distribute a .torrent, and then cron jobs to start the client download... Anybody have a similar, or more in-depth methodology like this?

thanks for all the responses
-Steve-

[ruizs]

bump - man, so many posts here things get lost quicly...