Sharing Linux ISOs over BitTorrent requires connecting to other people’s computers to download the file from them.

Ports are what they sound like, ports. Like USB ports on a computer. They are places where data can travel through. But they’re also specific and unique, which can be useful.

I wrote up a big thing explaining it further but it got complicated quickly.

The basic point is, ports are a quick and easy way to determine WHERE a piece of data or request for data should go.

Your computer is on a network, and has an internal address on that network. Let’s say it’s 192.168.1.1. The Internet is a whole separate network, with its own addresses.

Your modem is assigned an address on this Internet network. Let’s say it’s 56.56.56.56.

Ok, simple, right? You have a Linux ISO I want, so my computer sends a message to yours, at your Internet address of 56.56.56.56. Theoretically that should work fine (it probably wouldn’t for complicated reasons but I digress). Your modem gets the message, forwards it to your computer which is the only computer connected to it at 192.168.1.1. Bob’s your mother’s brother.

But wait, you don’t have one computer, you’ve got an Xbox too. So you install a router, a special computer that lets you share your modem with other computers. Your Xbox has been assigned an address of 192.168.1.2. So who gets the request for the file now? The request was sent to 56.56.56.56, but the router has two options to deliver it to, and no way to know, so the request gets dropped.

To solve this, we set up port forwarding. You tell your router that all requests sent to port 5000 should be directed to 192.168.1.1. And then when you broadcast the availability of the Linux ISO, along with your Internet address you also say to use port 5000.

So now when I want a piece of your file, I send the request to 56.56.56.56:5000, and your router sees that and says hey I know where that goes. Then your computer gets the request, and happily sends the file to me.

Now let’s say you use a VPN. You have the same problem. The VPN has one Internet address, but hundreds or thousands of people using it simultaneously. If you don’t have a port assigned to you, then requests for your file will get dropped by the VPN provider, because it’s impossible to know it was meant for you.

In all these examples, you can still download FROM people, even without a pre established port. I’m honestly not entirely clear on how this works. But I’m pretty sure it has something to do with your router remembering that you just sent data (in the form of a request) to the other persons address, so when data returns FROM that address, it knows where to send it. I think. There could be, and probably is, some other trickery going on there. But I’m working from memory here 🤷‍♂️

Now there are other ways around ports, and other complicated details that are probably important. And things like CGNATs that basically break this fundamental function of the Internet. And I might’ve gotten some of the details I’ve told you wrong. I’m happy to be corrected.

But what I’ve said is essentially true, and should help make a clearer picture for you.

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. This makes perfect sense to me. Overkill? Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know what this guys needs are.

Perfectly valid points,imo.

Thanks for the write-up!

I see now I was conflating zfs with RAID in general. It makes sense that you could have the benefits of a checksumming filesystem without the need for RAID, by simply restoring from backups.

This is a great start for me to finally get some local backups going.

Can you explain this to me better?

I need to work on my data storage solution, and I knew about bit rot but thought the only solution was something like a zfs pool.

How do I go about manually detecting bit rot? Assuming I had perfect backups to replace the rotted files.

Is a zfs pool really that inefficient space wise?

My cat is not listed.

We found him on our porch. When people ask his breed we just say porch cat.

Name is Fluffy.

Ooh, yeah, that’s a bit different… Not a good look

I was with you until the minute late thing. That’s crap. Grace period?

Not that I try to be late, I’m 99% early. But I’d be ticked to lose an hour because of couple minutes late on a bad morning. Though I guess some people may need that painful motivation to not abuse the system.

As I understand it, there’s a range of sizes that are problematic, from small to micro to nano and beyond.

The problem is the more plastic we make, and the smaller it starts, the easier it is for it to get worn down into smaller and smaller bits that become more problematic for us.

One of the problems with all the macro plastics in the ocean is that that as they get churned up and baked in the UV from the sun, smaller and smaller bits break off and become part of the… Everything.

Micro plastics are so prevalent that they can’t even do proper studies on how harmful it might be to us, because there are no control groups that have no plastics inside their bodies to compare against. Even babies in the womb have plastic in them. You have plastic in you right now, almost a 100% guarantee.

There’s probably more to it than that even, but that’s my understanding of it.

I used to like the a400, had a few of them in service, but a few years ago I tried another one and it was terrible. Just… Slow… like an HDD. I did some research and apparently they changed something with the nand somewhere along the line. Did a bait and switch. I don’t remember the details but it annoyed me.

I actually needed to buy a budget SSD just today, and I got a BX500. We’ll see how it goes. I know not to expect much from a drive without DRAM, but at least I know that going in.

Thanks, I thought of something even better. Slap Linux on that thing! Wipe the whole drive on “accident”. Linux is way more innocuous than pirate Windows 🤷‍♂️

Go with humility first, you screwed up. Follow it up with a joke about how you discovered a flaw in the configuration of work laptops, and now they can fix it to prevent someone else from being able to do that 🤷‍♂️ I think you’ll be ok

I don’t have any background knowledge to confirm this, but this seems like the extremely likely answer. Unfortunately.

ITT a ton of people not reading the OP 🤦‍♂️

Thanks!

Isn’t it dangerous to have every client also be a node? Sure, my torrents would come out someone else’s node, but someone else’s torrent could easily come out mine.

I don’t think my ISP cares whether it was actually me who used my IP to get a piracy complaint?

Or maybe I just don’t understand how it works?