3 ms·

Disclaimer: I've heard lots of great things about #!. However, I have never had the chance to try it myself. I kind of figured distributing the distro over tor

by nadams 12y ago

Disclaimer: I've heard lots of great things about #!. However, I have never had the chance to try it myself. I kind of figured distributing the distro over torrent only was a bad idea. For the kids sitting at home - torrenting isn't a bad thing (generally...usually). However, when you are sitting at work and they are monitoring traffic - downloading a torrent is a quick way to summon the overlords (even if you were in a technical position like I was - there are some things that they will look the other way, such as downloading the NT password reset disk, but downloading a torrent would not be one of them). And no, I wasn't about to "sneak" in a burned copy of #!. In today's day and age of CDNs and cloud storage I found it highly suspect that they couldn't find someone to mirror it (even uploading to sourceforge). I'm not claiming there was anything wrong with #! but offering a torrent only download makes me cautious.

eloisant 12y ago
I don't know, whenever I need to download a distro like Ubuntu I do it via torrent. For some reason it's way faster than downloading from the CDN.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- nadams 12y ago
  CDNs/Mirrors always downloaded fast for me (<5 minutes). It could be the auto selection not working well for you - which you should be able to overwrite.
6581 12y ago
There are mirrors - I guess they're unofficial though and not being linked to on the download page because of that.
- nadams 12y ago
  I tried some of the unofficial mirrors - the ones I could find did not have the latest version.
smellf 12y ago
They probably use torrents because they're easy and free. There's nothing shady about it, the distro just has ~1 maintainer and there's too much demand for #! for regular hosting to be viable. In the real world, using Bittorrent protocol is not wrong. I feel bad for you if you work in a place where the powers that be are fine with you downloading a distro via HTTP or FTP but not via Bittorrent.
- nadams 12y ago
  > there's too much demand for #! for regular hosting to be viable That is exactly why sourceforge and other (free) mirror services were created... In fact there are Linux ISO installers being hosted on sourceforge right now. > I feel bad for you if you work in a place where the powers that be are fine with you downloading a distro via HTTP or FTP but not via Bittorrent. That is a loaded comment - and I'm not really sure if you are trolling but... The company did have public mirrors for the popular distros so that wasn't an issue. FTP access was restricted. However, I would be VERY surprised if bittorrent is allowed any serious company. I worked at a place where new management wanted to open up everything - with strong recommendation from the netadmins to not do that. The netadmins were ignored, forced to open up everything and people started bittorrenting copyrighted material and got letters from MPAA/RIAA (which was rather funny because everything was logged on the firewall so you could see who was doing it...). I won't argue that bittorrent can be used for good things, however, due to the negative stigma and general stupidity of people most sane places would block it. Ignoring the fact that it's a bandwidth suck...
  - theonemind 12y ago
    I guess it depends on the work place. I work at an enterprise (>1000) sized corporation and I've torrented stuff without hearing about it. We also use bittorrent internally to help bring servers online.

by nadams 12y ago

eloisant 12y ago

I don't know, whenever I need to download a distro like Ubuntu I do it via torrent. For some reason it's way faster than downloading from the CDN.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nadams 12y ago
CDNs/Mirrors always downloaded fast for me (<5 minutes). It could be the auto selection not working well for you - which you should be able to overwrite.

6581 12y ago

There are mirrors - I guess they're unofficial though and not being linked to on the download page because of that.

nadams 12y ago
I tried some of the unofficial mirrors - the ones I could find did not have the latest version.

smellf 12y ago

They probably use torrents because they're easy and free. There's nothing shady about it, the distro just has ~1 maintainer and there's too much demand for #! for regular hosting to be viable. In the real world, using Bittorrent protocol is not wrong. I feel bad for you if you work in a place where the powers that be are fine with you downloading a distro via HTTP or FTP but not via Bittorrent.

nadams 12y ago
> there's too much demand for #! for regular hosting to be viable That is exactly why sourceforge and other (free) mirror services were created... In fact there are Linux ISO installers being hosted on sourceforge right now. > I feel bad for you if you work in a place where the powers that be are fine with you downloading a distro via HTTP or FTP but not via Bittorrent. That is a loaded comment - and I'm not really sure if you are trolling but... The company did have public mirrors for the popular distros so that wasn't an issue. FTP access was restricted. However, I would be VERY surprised if bittorrent is allowed any serious company. I worked at a place where new management wanted to open up everything - with strong recommendation from the netadmins to not do that. The netadmins were ignored, forced to open up everything and people started bittorrenting copyrighted material and got letters from MPAA/RIAA (which was rather funny because everything was logged on the firewall so you could see who was doing it...). I won't argue that bittorrent can be used for good things, however, due to the negative stigma and general stupidity of people most sane places would block it. Ignoring the fact that it's a bandwidth suck...
- theonemind 12y ago
  I guess it depends on the work place. I work at an enterprise (>1000) sized corporation and I've torrented stuff without hearing about it. We also use bittorrent internally to help bring servers online.