[Yum] Yum and Bittorrent

seth vidal skvidal at phy.duke.edu
Wed Oct 20 23:49:48 UTC 2004


> We are using the current version of yum that comes with Fedora Core 2 
> (2.0.7). However, our changes to the actual yum code are very minor 
> (less than 30 or so lines I would say) so all changes should be forward 
> and backward compatible. We also included one extra file to handle the 
> BitTorrent connections. There are some extra files that implement the 
> background uploading and an intelligent server manager that helps to get 
> the swarms started.



> Our implementation basically just hooks into urlgrabber. The 
> headers.info file is modified on the server to point to a .torrent file 
> instead of a .rpm file. When url grabber detects that it is downloading 
> a .torrent, it trips our code. Our code downloads the .torrent normally 
> then starts the BitTorrent process which continues with the download. 
> When the download is complete, yum contacts our client upload manager 
> and tells it that there is another file to seed. Yum then continues 
> normally and, with the exception of some extra debug output, the user 
> and yum can't tell and don't care if the file was downloaded via HTTP or 
> BT. Yum completes its work normally, but the client manager runs in the 
> background continuing to upload on the swarms that can use it.

So you setup a separate seed for each file?
Do you keep the seed around  after the download completes?

Aren't you taking a fairly serious performance hit?

-sv





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