On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 12:34, James Britt wrote:
> Does anyone have, or know of, snake-simple instructions on how to host 
> large files in a public server, making them available only through 
> bittorrent.

I followed the docs in the Python BT implementation
(http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html), and there's a guide
to it here:

http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/guide.html

> I poked around, and can see how to make a torrent file, and then get 
> that torrent file to a tracker, but I gather from this that the target 
> file is expected to be available form my PC, and only when I run a 
> bittorrent client.  I want to serve the files form ruby-doc.org, not my 
> home box.

Yup, per Ari's email, you can run a BT peer on ruby-doc.org itself.

> I expect that I will need to run a tracker on the server hosting the 
> files.  Is this what RubyForge does?

Yup, right on.  I suppose you could simply use RubyForge's tracker; that
should work, I think.

> This is off-topic for Ruby in general, but handy info as large 
> Ruby-related files become available.

BT is good stuff.  Ikkei and I are working on a BT Ruby library here -
http://aversa.rubyforge.org/ - so look for more BT jibber-jabber in the
future.

Yours,

Tom