Had my first expirence with BitTorrent today, and it was very positive. (except where is the torrent for Moz1.5 for Mac?)

I’ve never been much of a P2P person, Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, it was always too much trouble to use, keep track of, etc. So weird little experimental projects like BitTorrent has always seemed cool, but never enough to play with it.

However I really wanted the new Firebird (ps. new Mozilla, new Firebird, new Thunderbird, new website, and unless you’re running MacOS9 you’ve run out of excuse to be using IE), and the FTP servers where timing out. So I downloaded the BitTorrent.dmg, opened it, double clicked BitTorrent, double clicked the 1k .torrent file (I’m using Safari which apparently doesn’t auto-start torrent files), and it worked. No errors, no dependecies, no configuring, just pure, clean 80k/sec download speeds.( see blogzilla for a list of torrents )

Few Notes

Well there was some tricky configuration, apparently I’ll get ever better speeds if I allow uploading, which requires circumventing the NAT on my router(Linksys Linksys BEFW11S4), which I did (Advanced -> Forwarding -> Ports 6881 to 6889 -> TCP -> your internal IP address -> enable -> Apply). However I’m still getting 0k/s upload speeds. Don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, or if no one wants what I got.

Also, I quit and restarted BitTorrent several times trying to get my uploading working, and I can say the file resume works great!

And it is so very very nice that Mac is a real platform at last, where you can simply count on things like Python being there.

Now I wish someone would setup a torrent for Moz1.5 for OSX as I’m not entirely sold on FireBird, and I want to see if Moz1.5 solves my speed problem.

update: Interestingly Tim Bray had a very different expirence. I think I did the right thing waiting until I actually had a need.