"File downloads only for BigPond BroadBand Members" :( Snowolf Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Checking on Mininova.org didn't prove very helpful. A few copies of the DVDs are floating around, as well as a Ptwiki dump (not sure how complete). Seeding for all of them is practically non-existent. Results on ThePirateBay and a few other sites are about the same, and typically worse. -Chad On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:20 AM, Earle Martin <earle(a)downlode.org> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Earle Martin <earle(a)downlode.org> wrote: Why bother? It will almost certainly take a lot longer to download it via BT, even in Austrailia at the far end of the internet. ;) (not to mention that that offsite copies will usually end up stale...)

On 14/04/2008, Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm not sure it would actually be faster on BitTorrent than just downloading from Wikimedia. The WMF has rather a lot of bandwidth, and full en:wp dumps aren't in a huge amount of demand. - d.

Bryan Derksen wrote: The image dumps are unofficial and are so large that very few people can source them in their entirety, at least to more than a few people. So in this case bittorent was useful since it meant that the burden of hosting such massive files that potentially many people would want was distributed. It would be nice for Wikimedia to provide these in an official way, at least a seed and tracker of some sort, but there are still some technical problems to get around regarding image dumps made by the servers themselves (the current image dumps are made by downloading every single image file from the wiki being harvested from). It should also be noted that at the moment there isn't anyone (to my knowledge) who is making the image dumps so they are going to be stale anyway. MinuteElectron.

Bård Dahlmo wrote: This can be solved by installing a download manager, there are many that give you the ability to resume downloads even after loosing your internet connection or restarting your computer. MinuteElectron.

2008/4/15, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>om>: Or, if using Unix, the simple but efficient wget will do. Surely BT will check that the file you get is the same than the seeded one. But it is not "more reliable" than a direct download : you don't know if the seeded file matches the original file. The user sharing it likely downloaded it using HTTP : in this case using BT or a direct HTTP download gets you as much chances to get corrupted data. -- Nicolas Dumazet — NicDumZ Deuxième année ENSIMAG.

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 7:03 AM, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, I'm aware of the *theory*: BitTorrent hashes each chunk and automatically verifies them. But I'm curious to know if that makes a difference in *practice*, since someone mentioned it as a significant advantage of BitTorrent over HTTP.

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: In theory: 1) BitTorrent uses SHA1, TCP uses CRC32 (IIRC). CRC32 is more error-prone. 2) TCP only insures that the packet was transmitted correctly, not that the packet was correct in the first place. If, for instance, the torrent is published, some server or other stores a chunk to disk, and the chunk acquires an error on disk, BitTorrent will catch the error when someone requests the chunk. TCP will not, because the error was not on the network. 3) ???

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:01 AM, Earle Martin <earle(a)downlode.org> wrote: Or few enough downloaders. Wikimedia's bandwidth use is what, a few Gbps? Are the number of people downloading these dumps actually going to be enough to make a noticeable difference? I haven't heard that stated as a concern by Brion or anyone, so I assume not.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Simetrical wrote: Currently there's no reason to believe there's any problem. If we ever do decide the bandwidth usage is too high and if we think a BT tracker will help, we'll set up a BT tracker. Until that day, there's not much reason to mess about with it. - -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: I have not yet had data corruption with large HTTP downloads or BT downloads (not counting broken memory), so I don't know. BT divides the download in chunks and creates the SHA1 hash of each of those pieces, so even if part of the download is broken, you know which one and thus only have to redownload the broken part. Bryan

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I think that the advantage of BT is not the speed, but the fact that it handles data corruption far better (but slower) than HTTP. Bryan