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Comment by __Joker | Hacker News Reader

Anyone downloading software or any content over a slow and flaky network would question why people don't use torrents for distribution with some "permanent" seeder.

I really had a horrible experience sometime back, while downloading a software of around 2 GB. Where a network would die down and chrome would discard the partial download.

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Some distributors like Humble Bundle do on fact do this; the "permanent seeders" are called "web seeds", which are implemented by just having a standard HTTP server implementing the RANGE request. This let's a client fetch arbitrary chunks of a file, so a BitTorrent client can fetch ranges corresponding to torrent chunks.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm not familiar with Bittorrent's protocol. Can a regular HTTP server (say, nginx) be used as a web seed without any software in front of it translating the Bitorrent protocol requests into a regular HTTP request?

The trick is that the client has been modified to read the URLs in the .torrent file and to construct the appropriate range requests for getting pieces from the web seed.

In torrent clients that support it, you can simply add a webseed to an existing torrent. Works great for linux dists.

The torrent is making regular HTTP requests using the range header to the server. Its a feature most BitTorrent clients support.

Sure, you don't have to own the server either. http://burnbit.com/ is good for turning things into resumeable downloads

The problem with torrents are at the ends - initial seeding and lack of seeders as traffic declines. Both cases benefit from a static web seed.

I ran a site a couple of years ago that did this very thing, but it was quickly overwhelmed with illegal content..

Chrome's downloads can actually be resumed using the wget --continue flag I believe.

That depends on a few things, such as the file still being at the previous url, you still having access to the file, etc.

That's helpful, thank you!

That's not a protocol limitation, that's Chrome; plenty of other programs can resume HTTP downloads.

Some servers don't support it though. I know that's when Firefox throws away partial downloads.

Chrome? Why Chrome? :-) Browsers are not the best tool for the job, although support DL resume fairly well (e.g. Safari).

There are 'downloaders' to deal with this kind of issue. That said, torrents are most optimal for a non-stable network connection.

Downloader tools can be quite unpleasent. It is often a choice between overcomplicated adware, or you have to use the vendors software that may not be very good. Downloading large files should be as simple and reliable as small files for the user. Perhaps Metalink[1] support would help?

[1] http://www.metalinker.org/

aria2 is a pretty killer tool, no ad or anything. Just a CLI.

http://aria2.sourceforge.net/

Aria2 is incredible. +1 for it! Should be standard install on everyone's workstation if you need a download manager.

There's plenty of uncomplicated, adfree software. For Windows, I'm partial to Miniget (which supports both HTTP and Bittorrent): http://www.miniget001.com/

Yes. On OS X, I find myself using Leech¹ quite a bit.

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¹ — http://manytricks.com/leech/

They do. It's used in games very often for example. However, you have to cover this in your EULA (or whatever) and have to have fallback (either optional or automatic) because many ISPs would block such traffic.

In the US they aren't allowed to.

AT&T does. My internet would become unusably unstable every time I torrented, so I called them about it. They said they blocked torrents to "comply with the law" or somesuch BS, nevermind that I was attempting to download a Linux distro.

I didn't say they didn't, just that they weren't allowed to. See e.g. http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/05/technology/fcc-net-neutralit...

You may have also been hitting this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

I wouldn't put a lot of faith into what front-line tech support says. They'll often outright lie to you to get you off the phone.

Can you elaborate on this? My current ISP definitely shapes torrent traffic to the point where it is impractical to download anything larger than a few KB.

> I really had a horrible experience sometime back, while downloading a software of around 2 GB. Where a network would die down and chrome would discard the partial download.

Me too. And it was _Apple_ providing the download, for crissakes.

Not sure how someone can justify down voting me. It's a true story and relevant.

Tim Cook, is that you? (I don't think Tim Cook would do that).

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