Not really specific to Slackware, but as I haven't used bittorrent before, and as my first use of the app has been to download the new Slack 10 iso images, I thought it appropriate to ask here.

I set up bittorrent on a spare Linux box without X behind our NAT firewall and used lynx to establish four simultaneous download sessions -- one for each of the four Slackware 10 iso images. And then, I've just let it run. Top shows up to 76% cpu utilization and all four downloads continue to show up as processes many hours after the downloads were complete. Tcpdump on the firewall's external interface shows a lot of connections.

My question is this: am I actually helping by running a session for each of the four iso images (I've got the better part of a T1 to the 'Net), or is there a better way to help "share the wealth?"

If it doesn't cause any problems, I thought maybe I'd just let it run for a week or two. If there is a better way, then I'll look into changing it this weekend.

It's good that your sharing your bandwidth even though your not downloading, but the additional bandwidth to downloads really is negligible. It's up to you whether you need that computer for something else or if it and your bandwidth just stays idle, so you can continue uploading.

For people with very fast connections. I am sure that running a ftp can share the files faster without using too many system/network resources.

If you want to seed, make sure that you do not open too many connections and don't use up too many network resources. It may cause troubles to your local network. The command line could be:

/usr/local/bt/btdownloadheadless.py --max_uploads 35 --max_upload_rate 1024 --url http://www.slackware.com/torrents/sl...all-d1.torrent

I think it is not necessary to seed 4 isos

Thanks. If it has to be shut down for some reason, I'll try "seeding" this way when I start it back up. For now though, it seems to only be uploading at 180 K for all four isos combined, so I'll let it run through the weekend without changing anything. If it doesn't start using a lot more bandwidth than this, it isn't going to hurt anything.