Distributing Content with BitTorrent (O'Reilly)

[Posted August 31, 2005 by cook]

Robert Bernier discusses the publishing of content using BitTorrent on O'Reilly. "BitTorrent has three distinct components: the client, the web server, and the tracker. The client is the person/machine that downloads the content. The web server provides a link to a file called a torrent. The torrent is a specially created file that describes the shared file and the location of the tracker. This third component is a service that waits for a connection from a client. It sits on a user-assigned socket that can be either on the same machine as the web server or at another location. The tracker not only supervises the sharing of the content between multiple clients, but also logs all downloading activities. The tracker can manage many files at the same time from many different torrents on many different web servers."