Torrent version of FreedomBox

Hi,
I have a 24/7 seed box (ran by FreedomBox :smiley:) and i would like to add FreedomBox to the list. Is there a chance of releasing an official torrent file?

Cheers,
Mateda

Well… i have figured out that i can make those torrents myself, so here they are.

Sorry if this is considered spam but i was really excited to add my brick to this project. :stuck_out_tongue:

Peace

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@Mateda Good idea, but please also include the signature files (like https://ftp.freedombox.org/pub/freedombox/hardware/i386/stable/freedombox-stable-free_buster_all-i386.img.xz.sig) in the torrents. This will allow downloaders to confirm that the image file originated from freedombox.org.

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@jvalleroy We should consider publishing official torrents for at least the stable images after we enable backports and publish new stable images. Interested people can seed them from their FreedomBoxes.

Torrents provide more reliable downloads for people with low bandwidth connections.
They can also help get access to FreedomBox images if the usual HTTP downloads are blocked/censored.

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That sounds like a great idea! I have some spare storage on my freedomBox I don’t mind sharing!

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Should we have a separate torrent for each hardware target, or a single torrent that includes all the targets?

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I was planning to add a magnet link to each target’s download page on the website. So, I’m thinking of doing one torrent for each target.

Thanks for the reminder. I forgot about this after building the stable images.

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Perhaps individual torrents for each hardware Target. I assume most/some users use 8Gb micro SD cards. It would be a nice execution if there would be a link in the FreedomBox setting menu. In its own page, there would be an adjustable monthly limit for metered internet connections and a switch for each hardware torrent version to seed. This is easier said than done and, unfortunately I am not a developer so I can’t help much. But the whole idea of it being integrated into a FreedomBox instance is that it can automatically change out new versions of the FreedomBox official images. (After some googling, I think magnet links can fetch new versions of the files while keeping the same magnet signature. If I am correct, this is ideal because it will virtually automatic to maintain on the user side as he/she does not need to host new torrents as they come out)

Ideally, there should be an automated pipeline that generates torrent files for stable images as they are being published. This is not hard to setup.

Planning to use this tracker from Debian: http://bttracker.debian.org:6969

I think it would be ideal if the current server hosting the images can also run a BitTorrent client, so that no duplication of files is required.

Another easy option is to serve the images from an S3 bucket.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/S3TorrentPublish.html

I am not comfortable that the BitTorrent tracker will be Amazon’s in this case. But BitTorrent downloads are not anonymous anyway. So, I’m not sure if this matters. However, it has the benefit of good uptime, replication over multiple continents and reliable downloads.

cc @gnoutchd

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