At 12:25 PM +0100 9/9/2011, G.W. Haywood wrote:
> On 8-9 Sep 2011 Luca Gibelli and I wrote:
> > > If anyone can provide a CVD mirror in US, please contact me directly.
> > We definitely need more capacity in the db.us.clamav.net RR.
>
> I've asked this before and never had an answer, so I'll ask again.
> > Is there a reason why torrents can't be used?
On Thu, 08 Sep 2011 Jim Preston wrote:
> Torrents have a bad reputation from pirating software, illegal digital
media distribution, distributing infections and malware and such. I am
> not sure I would trust torrents in a general way.
Since the widespread adoption of strong encryption and digital
certificates the Internet has been used securely to transfer
verifiable and non-repudiable information. The published ClamAV
databases are verifiably signed.
Exactly. Either the pieces are already properly verified by
freshclam before being added into the local database, or there is a
massive security vulnerability that needs to be addressed immediately!
> ... spreading the work over many pipes ...
That's the whole point, and that's why I keep banging on about it. :)
At 11:40 PM +0200 9/7/2011, Luca Gibelli wrote:
Traffic is around 5TB/month on each mirror.
Short of a paid service, which I doubt any of us want, few have such
bandwidth available to donate.
Clam needs to leverage the power of the Internet - as it is now, not
yesterday. The simple, semi-linear "propagate thru a few mirrors"
design has obviously reached a limit... 5 TB *per mirror* per
month!!!??? Just to maintain a tiny 36 MB database? d'oh!
It may have worked just fine yesterday, but, seriously, just a model
that's waiting to fall on its face as Clam becomes more popular.
So, I'm thinking that leaves two choices: 1) a cloud, a la Amazon S3. 2) p2p.
Maybe, someday, when the well-cached cloud services are fully
propagated *and* reliable world-wide, using a cloud in leiu of the
traditional mirror set-up might be viable. But IMO that's years away
and too expensive.
Right now, IMO, a p2p set-up would be the most viable. Continue to
propagate via mirrors. *ADD* the torrent. Together, we clam users
have many times the bandwidth needed!
Is there a way to make freshclam grab and verify database files from
a local directory? If there is, creating a torrent set-up would be
fairly easy, even on an ad-hoc basis. I think it would be
interesting to get a test going...
WRT the reputation of p2p/torrents... There are quite a few legit
uses for p2p. A number of open source products are even distributed
via bittorrent. Yes, some ISPs are blocking the protocol -- but when
shown that it's a legit use, they're usually willing to fix that.
fwiw,
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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