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closeInstitutional Firewalling?
Posted by spetznatz on 16 Apr 2010 at 05:31 GMT
Great paper. I am and have always been a huge fan of the 'large datasets over bittorrent' idea. In my view, it really is the best way technologically.
The glaring problem, and this isn't addressed in the paper is that the vast majority of educational institutions block bittorrent for file sharing reasons. That's a great way to stop the main modern piracy method, but inconvenient in this context. Are administrators at every university supposed to add each scientific torrent tracker URL to a whitelist? Is there going to be a global registry of torrent trackers deemed 'legal' and 'relevant to research' to overcome this? Due to these problems, I think any solution will be a while off and is yet another 'culture change' problem - though one that needs to happen.
Currently my site, TARDIS.edu.au shares large diffraction datasets on a federated HTTP model. It's not ideal, but it works and hosts ~300GB of data currently from a couple of institutions. A complementary repository for private data from the Australian Synchrotron Facility also hosts about 3TB via a similar model. Obviously bittorrent would be the ideal method, but at least in Australia, fair arm-twisting would have to occur for sysadmins to whitelist even one tracker in their firewall rules.
RE: Institutional Firewalling?
jeisen replied to spetznatz on 16 Apr 2010 at 06:09 GMT
Personally, I think the way to get universities and others to rethink their Bittorrent firewalling is to show them that there are legitimate uses for Bittorent. The more we demonstrate that, the easier it will be to open up the firewalls.
RE: Institutional Firewalling?
mlangill replied to spetznatz on 16 Apr 2010 at 16:29 GMT
First, I am not really sure how many institutions block BitTorrent traffic. I know that some definitely do, but I'm not sure that "vast majority" is necessarily accurate. For example my institution (UC Davis) does not block BitTorrent traffic. If anyone has statistics on this it would be very welcome.
Second,I don't think researchers should feel that they are hostage to their system administrators. If researchers are being hindered by polices at their institution then they should ask for these to be amended. As Jonathan has already stated many universities may reconsider these policies as more legitimate uses for BitTorrent increases.
Third, many BitTorrent clients have developed ways to evade many of these firewalling techniques (varying ports, use of encryption, using UDP instead of TCP, etc.). Although I would recommend that researchers try to address these policies directly instead of circumventing them, these BitTorrent clients can be used as a temporary solution to obtaining data on BioTorrents.
RE: Institutional Firewalling?
mchelen replied to spetznatz on 17 Apr 2010 at 07:48 GMT
Multiple BitTorrent and HTTP download sources can be combined in file types such as Metalink http://bit.ly/1zeOId to give the client a choice of protocols.
Web sources can also be included in BitTorrent files with Web Seeding http://bit.ly/aYROuE