Bittorrent is a great way to distribute content over the mesh, because it is decentralised. Multiple copies of the files can be distributed over the network and shared, and Bittorent will figure out the optimal way to download the files, even if the network is segmented.

We are currently sharing legal files, for example OpenWRT images, a mirror of Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap tiles.

We use public trackers to share files, and a tracker is also present on the mesh network itself. Through Local Peer Discovery, you should also be able to discover the peers on the local network even if that tracker is down.

Downloading Reseaulibre's software through bittorrent

Just download this torrent and open it with your bittorrent client.

The images here are generated from this OpenWRT feed:

git clone git://src.anarcat.ath.cx/reseaulibre-feed

How to create a torrent

Creating a torrent file is simple, and requires only a small piece of software. Most Bittorrent clients ship with such a tool, however only qBittorrent was able to generate a proper torrent with support for Web seeding. Web seeding means we don't have to have files opened in a bittorrent tracker, a web mirror is enough to seed the files. More specifically, we are using the Getright protocol.

Note that as Transmission can't create those torrents yet, and the bittornado client has its own different protocol which is also used by Deluge and others, so you need to be careful when choosing "web seeds", they are not all compatible with each other.

Here are the list of trackers you should use:

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80
udp://tracker.publicbt.com:80
udp://tracker.ccc.de:80
udp://tracker.istole.it:80

Then you also need to add the following as a webseed URL:

http://packages.reseaulibre.ca:8080/Routeurs/

This is inspired by the way Archive.org host their files through Bittorent.

Hosting a Bittorrent tracker

In progress.

Hosting a Bittorrent tracker is fairly easy and can help the network's resilience in hosting files. Amongst the different Bittorrent trackers, we are looking into Opentracker as it is highly portable and is used by Archive.org.

See this howto: https://forum.suprbay.org/showthread.php?tid=58785. A Debian request for package has been filed: Debian bug #685575.