preston/bittorious

h1 Frequently Asked Questions
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    h1 Who supports this?
    .lead BitTorious is primarily developed and maintained by Preston Lee at the Biomedical Informatics department in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. Bittorious enables the authenticated, electronic transfer of big data files generated by scientific instruments.Researchers at different locations are connected to each other over the Internet using BitTorrent as a standard protocol built into the Bittorious application.  
    b
        | Read the original BMC Bioinformatics papers on 
        i = link_to 'the original portal release', 'http://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-014-0424-9'
        | , and the  
        i = link_to 'follow-up on volunteer mode', 'http://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-015-0779-6'
        | .
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        h3 Can I run more than one client?
        p Yes! And if you're using an authenticated account, the tracker will even map your peers to your account automatically.

        h3 Can I share the .torrent files and RSS links to a friend?
        p No no no NO!!! Every .torrent file and RSS link is generated specifically for YOU, and contains an authentication token that should be kept private. Forwarding it is essentially the same as forwarding your username and password.

        h3 I accidentally leaked my authentication token. What should I do?
        p It's not a huge deal as long as you invalidate it.
        ol
            li Go the your BitTorious account page.
            li Regenerate you authentication token.
            li Redownload any reimport any .torrent files and RSS links into your bittorrent client, because the old token is now invalid, and anyone registered with the tracker should drop off automatically in about #{Peer::UPDATE_PERIOD_MINUTES} minutes.
            li You do NOT need to re-download any data. :)

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        h3 How do files get distributed?
        p BitTorrent networks are peer-to-peer (P2U) "swarms": distributed clusters of computers that can download and upload from each other based on available bandwidth. This is different from conventional file transfer mechanisms based purely on HTTP, FTP, and rsync, where a single source server is generally used, with additional secondary "mirrors". With BitTorrent, the impact of distributing large files to both your local network and server are reduced by relying on the collective bandwidth of the entire swarm.

        h3 What BitTorrent clients can I use with BitTorious?
        p Any client that supports SSL encryption, honors "private" torrents, and supports RSS feeds should work, though we currently recommend #{link_to 'uTorrent', 'http://www.utorrent.com'} on Windows, OSX, and Linux. Private torrents (#{link_to 'BEP-0027', 'http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0027.html'}) and RSS feeds (#{link_to 'BEP-0036', 'http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0036.html'}) are extensions of the bittorrent specification, so some clients may only support some combination of the relevant features.

        h3 What is BitTorrent?
        p BitTorrent is a protocol used for peer-to-peer file sharing. Wikipedia has an in-depth article #{link_to 'here', 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent'}. With BitTorrent, pieces of a file are shared between computers that are participating in the network.

        h3 What is a .torrent file?
        p A small file with information that tells your torrent client how to get the data you wish to download. It does not contain the data payload itself.