A bit torrent idea
I have an idea, that I would like to implement over time, but currently lack the skills, so I lay it out here on the off chance that someone should see it, and implement it (I do ask that if you are a company and intend to release something like this that you seek my permission, if you are going to Open source it under a GPL licence, go ahead!).
People who have a low volume, low bandwidth site (like me) don’t really want to shove files up on our websites for people to download as apache sees fit to serve out, as it has the potential to flood or overload the upstream bandwidth available. Bittorrent has the capability to to help alleviate this issue, as the peers also seed or upload to new peers, a great system, but its a pain to maintain and does not really scale all that well for large numbers of files.
I am thinking of a system, that would need to survive reboots, be scaleable and have a level of inteligence to ensure a best effort service for users in such a fasion as not to squish the available bandwidth.
It should prevent direct linking/downloading. (It should be noted that the idea of this system is not for the distribution of copyrighted content, but rather to allow a form of bit torrent archiving ability – think home movies, linux iso’s from way back stuff like that).
It should be able to throttle overall usage to a set value.
It should be able to have some means of setting/detecting popular torrents that are seeding well or in need of better seeding and scale bandwidth on a per torrent basis.
It should now this is the tricky bit allow for someone to download something that it not so popular and allow it to be uploaded over time even if there are multiple other more popular files being actively used without halting the distribution of those files.
I’m thinking that a tracker/client combo needs to be developed, in the form of a service (or perhaps apache mod <-- is that possible?) that can be set to lookin a specific dir and generate .torrents and register them with the local tracker, it should idealy auto check for new files and do ALL the heavy lifting itself. M