The Medusa Fora

Not sure if this is okay....I have browsed the forum looking for comprehensive noddy instructions on how to use torrents and ftps etc but am having no luck. I have managed to download bitlord but when I try to transfer info, the file I want just sits there with "connecting......" in the status column.

So as not to offend anyone on the site, could I ask for anyone in the knwo to PM me with options/help?

Cheers in advance

Ain't nothing wrong with knowing how these protocols work.

FTP is one of the older protocols on the Internet. It stands for File Transfer Protocol and, as the name implies, is designed to move files from one place to another.

A common problem with FTP is that its default configuration requires that the server be able to open a connection back to the client (rather than most other protocols where the client and server communicate over the connection that was opened by the client). Most modern environments break this, though, because firewalls will not typically allow connections from the outside world to penetrate. Often times FTP issues can be addressed by changing to what's called "passive" mode (aka PASV, named for the protocol instruction the client sends to the server).

At a very basic level FTP servers are very similar to web (HTTP/S) or mail (IMAP/POP3/SMTP) servers. There's a central machine that many clients send requests to and get responses back from. This is the classic client/server model. Unfortunately if that central computer becomes overwhlemed by requests, or if its network connection is flooded with data being transfered, things go to hell. The only way for server owners to protect themselves against this is to invest in bigger & bigger boxes and bigger & bigger network connections. Eventually this costs A Lot Of Money.

So this gets us to BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a protocol designed to spread the pain of transferring a lot of data away from one centralized location and instead have that pain shared by all the clients downloading - in essence making them each a tiny server with a tiny amount of the overall work to be done.

Imagine that instead of getting your newspaper from one spot you started by asking your neighbor on one side for the sports section and your neighbor on the other side for the editorial. A few minutes later your neighbor across the street asks you for the sports section, so you copy and send it over while at the same time asking that neighbor for the comics. Eventually you end up with the entire newspaper, but the publisher only had to send it out once or twice rather than thousands of times.

Unfortunately you also need a way to coordinate these transactions. Imagine that each edition of the newspaper has a cork board that describes all the sections, and all the neighbors post notes to it saying "I've got the Sports Section and am looking for the Comics," etc. You check this board, let people know what you're looking for, and hopefully receive it while at the same time sending what you already have to others also looking for the paper. Sometimes, though, you'll just see lots of people posting messages to the cork board asking for the sections of the paper, but nobody indicating that hey have any sections. In these cases you will all sit there for a very long time waiting for somebody to show up that actually has part of the paper. If nobody shows up, then the paper is effectively gone forever.

BitTorrent is becoming popular with corporations because it allows a distributed way for them to send large chunks of data (new application updates, music files, whatever) without having to exponentially invest in their server infrastructure. It's also already popular in the "trading" community for much the same reason, but ALSO because it makes it very difficult for authorities or copyright owners to kill the data once it gets out. The servers that spread the torrents (the cork boards above) aren't actually doing anything overtly wrong - they're saying "call Larry to get some pot" but are not actually selling pot. As such it's very difficult to make any real legal threat against them. And it's nearly impossible to kill an anonymous (or nearly so) network of peers that are pushing and pulling data from eachother.


Hmm. I don't think this actually answered your question at all. You now know more about why these protocols work, but you don't really know why your particular connections are failing. Teh suck.

philipchevron wrote::shock:

It would have needlessly confused things had I gone into detail about the blinker fluid, flux capaciter, and the kilojoul of power needed to drive the "progress" bar in the client.

I'm with Phil!

Of course, the simplest way to get hold of these tracks would be if they were released in an official shiny boxed set. Erm...hold on....