Bittorrent

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Well, I've got to say BitTorrent has come a long way...

I installed the optional "shadow" client available on my Mandrake 10.0 system, 
read up on the firewall requirements, punched through, found a torrent, and 
nothing happened.  "Failed to connect" - real helpful.

However, I hunted around, and did manage to find a decent torrent, and sure 
enough, I got about what I get when I can manage to find a good FTP server, 
300+ kB/s. The speed often dropped below that, down under 200, but what the 
heck, chances of finding a full-speed ftp feed on an iso are pretty poor too.

Error reporting could be better.  It's likely that that "failed to connect" 
was actually inability to write to the target directory, which also gives a 
meaningful "failed" when I know that's the problem.  There are still a lot of 
bogus torrents listed out there.  Maybe it's a good idea, but I still say 
it's not quite there yet.  

(Oh, and the firewall thing is so basic that it should be easy to code around 
it, or at least pop up the directions when the cleint detects that it's 
blocked.)