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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

2005. So I guess this didn't catch on.

Ubuntu still provides zsync of its installation media: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/17.04/release/

That said, I'm not sure I know of any other major users of it -- most people just use a .torrent (which similarly has checksums of each piece so you know which pieces need to be downloaded).

Not a major user, but we're using zsync for system updates of our Raspberry Pi based digital signage operating system (https://info-beamer.com/hosted). It's pretty great and offers a few things we couldn't do with bittorrent: Every time we have a new release we put together an install.zip file of everything required (kernel, firmware files, initrd, squashfs). Users can download this file directly and unzip it on their SD card and it will boot our OS. For updates we use a previous (see below) version of our install.zip already available on the device and only download the changes. We then unzip that into a new partition for an A/B booting.

Zsync is awesome as we can specify any number of existing files already available on the device (with the -i command line option) and zsync will try to make use of them to minimize downloads. We really use this feature to our advantage: zsync by default will keep the previous version of a file if it's going to overwrite it. So we have two versions of install.zip on a device. When switching between OS releases (stable / testing...) we can switch back and forth with zero additional downloads as both versions are available and zsync makes use of that. Similarly after a user installs our OS, we just have the unpacked artefacts (kernel, etc.) on the SD. We can quickly recreate an initial version of the install.zip file on the device by seeding the download with those files. It's usually just 500k to construct an initial install.zip file we then later use to minimize all future updates.

Did any IoT device management service fit the bill too (back then or now)? We are heading towards a similar use case.

OS development for info-beamer started in 2013. I'm fairly sure nothing even close was available back then. I'm not sure about today. So far I don't regret the NIH approach we took.

Yes, this seems to have been replaced mostly by bittorrent.

On the other hand, HTTP has the advantage that it works through corporate proxies and that is usually not blocked by over-cautious admins.

I'll note that bittorrent uses HTTP for a few different things:

- HTTP(s) based trackers (although UDP is more common these days) - HTTP webseeds/mirrors (BEP-17) - (if you count it) webtorrent uses Websocket trackers and can support HTTP webseeds (although really of course the P2P is WebRTC)

> which similarly has checksums of each piece so you know which pieces need to be downloaded

Can you achieve differential downloads with bittorrent?

The AntiX Linux distro also provides zsync downloads:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/antix-linux/files/Final/ant...

A long time ago on a crappy restricted internet I used this and jigdo at different times to download the Ubuntu ISO. Being able to do so for Ubuntu and not other distributions was another factor in my using Ubuntu back then.

Thank you to the sibling comments for mentioning that you're using zsync. I'm sorry my comment was so negative.

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