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| Core Concepts
p BitTorious's core ideas are a combination of existing popular concepts:
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dt Torrent
dd A "torrent" refers to a set of files that is published as a cohesive unit of data ready for distribution. The "torrent" can be a single file, directory of files, or any combination thereof, and is initially defined using client software that produces a .torrent file.
dt Publication
dd A user ready to publish data does so by registering the torrent with a data "feed" via the BitTorious portal, and initiates the "seeding" process to other client subscribers via the local client software.
dt Subscription
dd An authorized user wanting all current and future data published to a given feed uses the BitTorious portal to find download links, and their locally installed Client to either automatically acquire all feed data as it is available, or selectively download individual torrents.
dt Seeding
dd A Client that has a full or partial copy of a torrent will, by default, be available to distribute the torrents to other subscribers. Limits can be set on throughput usage, time of use, quality of service, hard download/upload caps, or be turned off completely for each individual client.
p
| Accounts within the web application are managed in a role-based manner. Roles are applied
i per user per feed
| . Only feed publishers (and global administrators) may change feed settings and permissions. All approved users may log in to the portal even if they haven't yet been granted access to any feeds!
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dt Subscriber
dd May join any torrent in the feed, but not make any changes to it.
dt Publisher
dd All abilities as Subscribers, plus the ability to update and delete the feed, publish new torrents to it, and set feed access permissions.
h3 Administrator
p Administrative permissions are global, and allows access to all portal features. Only administrators may create new feeds, check overall network status, and approve/deny new account requests.
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| Architectural Components
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| Portal
p If you'd like to run your own private BitTorrent network, you'll need an instance of the BitTorious portal: the cross-platform web application you're looking at right now. The portal supports the latest stable versions of mainstream, HTML5-compliant web browsers. Specifically, support is included for the latest release versions of:
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li Chrome
li Firefox
li Safari
li Internet Explorer
p Internally, the portal's web application stack utilizes a PostgreSQL relational database to store active peer connection data, system accounts, feeds, and torrent metadata.
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| Clients: BitTorrent-Compliant
p A client is simply a machine running a supported BitTorrent client to seed and/or download content to/from feeds, respectively. After the original publishing machine completes the initial seeding process to the swarm, it can optionally be taken offline. As long as data on the aggregate network of online Client machines contains all pieces of a given torrent, the data can be downloaded to completion by any current or future client. This characteristic of collective data replication provides an extremely resilient, high-ability architecture.
p Note that it is generally assumed that the throughput rates of your underlying file system greatly exceed the throughput available over your Internet connection. If this is the case -- which it almost certainly is -- higher capacity disks will likely prove a better investment than higher throughput disks.
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h4 Dedicated Clients
p The optionally addition of "dedicated" clients adds another availability component to the high-availability nature of the client system. The notion of a "dedicated" client is purely semantic, and there is no technological difference versus a normal client, with the understanding that a dedicated client is expected to:
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li Seed all torrents for the feeds to which it is dedicated.
li Have enough bandwidth and underlying storage space to appropriately accommodate the needs of the publisher and subscriber base. This requires estimation on behalf of the deployment team to provide enough underlying storage.
h2 Clients: BitTorious Volunteer
p The next major release of BitTorious will support a custom client installable called "BitTorious Volunteer". The volunteer client will allow anonymous netizens to "donate" a small portion of their local disk for partial replication of feeds with the "Enable Public Archiving" flag enabled. This is the primary development focus of BitTorious v3. The client software will be released in coordination with the v3 portal.
section.row#deployment
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| Security
p Unlike standard BitTorrent, we've added authentication and authorization checking at three stages:
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li Web portal login.
li Client data feed (RSS) update requests.
li Client registration and keep-alive with the web portal.
p BitTorious controls access to the peer tracker using an user-specific authentication token embedded in the .torrent file downloaded by the user. For this reason, you should never share your .torrent files. New users may request access via the portal homepage.
p We also encourage the use of password protected compression such as Zip or Gzip prior to publication for sensitive data as an additional layer of security.
p Note that the compliance level of all systems in the network is given to individual client sites to enforce, as BitTorious doesn't know about the infrastructure at individual sites. BitTorious (and underlying BitTorrent protocols) are agnostic to computing environment and can be run in any cloud computing environment that provides IaaS, but cannot programmatically determine which data, if any, is subject to special compliance rules. For uses subject to environmental restrictions such as HIPAA, BitTorious can be hosted on appropriately protected IT infrastructure. Please consider the nature of your data and metadata needing publication prior to deploying your own instance of the portal.
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| Household Friendly
p Accessing your data feeds on typical "home" networks is trivial with routers supporting UPnP. If you have a older router or don't want to enable UPnP, a few simple port forwarding rules for your BitTorrent client will work just as well!
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| Enterprise Manageability
p Please let your IT department make adequate preparations to prepare for fluctuating use of the overall client network. Specifically, the following checklist can be used as a starting point of consideration when planning to deploy clients internal to your organization:
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th Consideration
th IT Infrastructure
th Client Configuration
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td Traffic blocking
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td Quality of Service
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td Port/Address Restrictions
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td Bandwidth Shaping
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td Time of Use Restrictions
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td Hard Transfer Caps
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td Upload/Download Ratio Limits
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td Direct Internal Transfers
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