One of the features that I've been anxiously awaiting is the "Local Peer Discovery" feature in uTorrent 1.7x. Basically, it uses a multicast to discover bittorrent clients that are active on your local network. It can determine if they are seeding or leeching a torrent that you're interested in. If it's available on the network, it will try to use it as a peer, and download it at massive speeds.
I can think of a couple of really great uses for this. The first is a scenario that I run into at work occasionally. I'll try to download a video or file that a co-worker wants to see as well. Instead of competing for bandwidth, we can now both download it at the same time, and share the pieces quickly and automatically.
The other great use that I'm really excited about is LAN parties. For those of you that don't know, a common LAN party problem is that everyone wants to get a copy of a game off of one computer. Everyone tries to copy it at one time, effectively rendering the network and the hard drive useless. The current solution is to copy it to some computers, and then have people get it from the copies. It works, but it's manual, and it's not fun.
Along comes bittorrent to the rescue. Before you're next lan party, create torrents for all of your games or maps, or whatever, and distribute the tiny torrents. You can even send them to each user via email before the party. As people show up, they can start the torrent, and they automatically become a server AND a client. It effectively uses everyone's hard drive and connection and you sit back and wait. I have yet to try it at a LAN party, but I think it will work very well. You could even throttle the connection and let it run while you play other games.
I did actually verify that the feature works as expected. On one computer in my network, I set up a distributed trackerless torrent. I set that machine up as a seeder. I loaded the torrent on another machine, it auto-discovered the other machine, and downloaded at a great speed. It wasn't exactly distributed, but it demonstrated that it does work.
I'm anxiously awaiting the next LAN party when I can try it out.
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posted @ Tuesday, August 14, 2007 2:37 PM