While BitTorrent is not NAT-friendly, BT clients like Azureus seem to avoid the NAT pitfalls. On my home network, for the life of me, I cannot get BT to work; however, Azureus works 95% of the imte. Tracking works as well.
As for the multiple ports, I'm not sure, but I would assume that this is a scaling issue. Given that BT can be used by 1000s or 100s of 1000s of people, you would reach the max number of source ports for any given destination port. I don't think the average user could actually reach 64511 connections to their machine, but if they did then connections would timeout until a source port was free. Given the size of source files and the number of players online at any given time this limit might be reached in the proposed design. You could opt to use ea trackerless torrent (HDT) if the tracker issues is problematic. I found some okay info on the BT site: http://www.bittorrent.com/guide.html http://www.bittorrent.com/protocol.html http://userpages.umbc.edu/%7Ehamilton/btclientconfig.html -D On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, ScratchMonkey wrote: > The protocol for BitTorrent is out there. Blizzard uses it for WoW updates. > The big drawback is that it's not NAT-friendly, because the client must > also be a server listening on multiple ports. (Which reminds me, I need to > ask on the BT list why it needs more than one listen port.) > > Historically BT has needed a "tracker" which stays informed of what clients > exist in the swarm. A new client registers with the tracker and the tracker > adds it to the list of clients participating for that file. All other > traffic is client-to-client (ie. peer-to-peer). There are some tracker-less > extensions to the latest BT protocol, but I don't know the details. For > this application, the game server can act as a tracker to its clients, and > a Steam master server could act as a meta-tracker, using the game servers > to funnel and reduce tracker traffic. > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
