[ale] Two-part Bit Torrent Client?

[Michael Hirsch]

On 7/3/05, David Corbin <dcorbin at machturtle.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 03 July 2005 11:11 am, George Carless wrote:
> > It sounds to me as though you're describing a proxy - for which
> > purpose anything like Squid etc. would do the trick just fine.
> 
> Yes.  A proxy, and a client to support, but not an http proxy.  A bit-torrent
> proxy.  Last I heard, squid was a HTTP.

Is your issue that you have multiple machines running  bittorrent and
it is hard to open up the firewall for all of them, or is it just that
you have one client and would rather not open the ports for it?

If the latter, I don't see a big difference between a proxy, and
opening up the ports on the firewall.  Either way you are putting a
hole in the firewall.  I suppose there could be a political or
administrative difference: If you have access to an outside machine
but not to the firewall  you could still get bittorrent to work.

If the problem is that you have multiple clients and want them all to
be able to participate, I'm really not sure if the protocol provides
enough info to the proxy to determine which client to connect to.  The
proxy would need to know which client the incoming request is for, and
I don't know if the protocol provides enough information to map to a
particular client.

Michael