[ale] Two-part Bit Torrent Client?

[David Corbin]

On Tuesday 05 July 2005 01:54 pm, Michael Hirsch wrote:
> On 7/3/05, David Corbin <dcorbin at machturtle.com> wrote:
> > On Sunday 03 July 2005 11:11 am, George Carless wrote:
> > > It sounds to me as though you're describing a proxy - for which
> > > purpose anything like Squid etc. would do the trick just fine.
> >
> > Yes.  A proxy, and a client to support, but not an http proxy.  A
> > bit-torrent proxy.  Last I heard, squid was a HTTP.
>
> Is your issue that you have multiple machines running  bittorrent and
> it is hard to open up the firewall for all of them, or is it just that
> you have one client and would rather not open the ports for it?

The latter, right now.

>
> If the latter, I don't see a big difference between a proxy, and
> opening up the ports on the firewall.  

It seem to me there is a humongous difference between opening a port in my 
firewall that allows new connections to be established to a machine inside 
the firewall, and me being able to connect to a machine outside  the firewall 
that's going to NAT my connection anyway.  Specifically, I'm thinking about 
security.

> If the problem is that you have multiple clients and want them all to
> be able to participate, I'm really not sure if the protocol provides
> enough info to the proxy to determine which client to connect to.  The
> proxy would need to know which client the incoming request is for, and
> I don't know if the protocol provides enough information to map to a
> particular client.

I'm not insisting that it use the existing protocol, though that would be 
nice. :)