Linux Iso Seeder

This post is the translation of Linux Iso Seeder.

Linux Iso Seeder

About three months ago, Archlinux had to endure a DDoS attack. As stated in the announcement, the download page was also affected. This video by Brodie Robertson gave me the idea for a tool that automatically downloads and seeds torrents of Linux ISOs. Ideally, I could install this tool on my server and thus make a permanent contribution to reducing the load on the Archlinux servers.

In order not to reinvent the wheel I first searched to see if there were any existing tools that already solved this problem. And lo and behold, after a little searching, I found Squazz’s linux-iso-seeder. This script automates the procurement of .torrent files for various Linux distributions and automatically feeds them to a torrent client. The client then collects the ISOs from various other torrent clients and makes them available to new torrent clients.

What is Torrent?

Torrent or BitTorrent is a protocol for sharing files that is organized as a peer-to-peer network. When you download a file, you make the parts you have already downloaded available for download by other clients. This distributes the load across multiple clients and allows the network to regulate itself. If many people want to download a file, they also make parts of the file available for download, thereby increasing the capacity of the peer-to-peer network. In addition to this self-regulation, another advantage of Torrent is its decentralization. There is not just one server that provides the data, but many nodes in the peer-to-peer network. This makes torrenting more fail-safe than central download servers.

But aren’t torrents illegal?

Important: The following applies to the next section: I am not a lawyer and am merely giving my own interpretation and opinion of the current legal situation (in Germany). If in doubt, you should seek legal advice.

Every now and then, you hear that you should stay away from torrents because they are illegal. This misconception stems from the fact that torrents are often used to distribute pirated copies of copyrighted material. However, this confuses the technology with the action. Sending pirated copies by mail would be just as illegal. But that doesn’t make letters themselves illegal. Since Linux ISO files are freely available and the .torrent files are provided by the distributions themselves, seeding (making them available via torrent) is not illegal, as it does not violate copyright nor does it involve the exchange of illegal material.

Call to action

If you would also like to give something back to the Linux community or your distribution of choice, you can use linux-iso-seeder. The current Docker image is available here. (The difference to the original Docker image from Squazz is the support for Archlinux)

docker run git.ratte.dev/laboratte5/linux-iso-seeder:latest \
    -p “51413:51413” \
    -v ./downloads:/downloads \
    -v ./watch:/watch \
    -v ./logs:/logs \
    -v ./config:/config

Requirements
For a rough estimate of the system requirements, I have listed the statistics for the last two weeks here. The bandwidth values correspond to the average over the entire two weeks and should therefore only be considered a very coarse guideline.

Your distribution is not yet supported?
Clone the repository, implement support, and open a pull request here.