BitHorde

Welcome to bithorde, the fast and light content distribution system, aimed for high-performance de-centralized content distribution.
Key features are;

* High performance
+ Gigabits of possible throughput on average consumer hardware (if your network and storage-media can cope)
* Light footprint
+ Only consumes a few megabytes of RAM, and few CPU cycles. Ideal for running in background on machines with other purposes.
* Live streaming
+ BitHorde works like a distributed, heavily cached filesystem of read-only assets.

Things have been really stable lately, with relatively few serious hiccups. Only two relatively small things have been fixed for RC2.

* A performance bottleneck was spotted, in querying for assets in BitHorde, causing much more I/O than necessary. This is now fixed by caching file sizes.
* A relatively rare deadlock were identified and fixed, and locking in general was improved in many areas.

Please give it a try, and see if you can identify some more quirks needing attention before final 0.2.

With some interesting feature-additions, and lots of stability-enhancements, BitHorde 0.2-beta1 is out the doors.

The release decision came from the realization "Oh, I haven't had reason to touch this for a month. It's just worked."

In other words, should be stable enough for anyone, but further testing will of course improve quality.

Binaries and source can be found in the usual places.

Late yesterday, one of the final features planned for 0.2 landed in Git; *Linked SourceAssets*.

With *Linked SourceAssets*, instead of uploading the asset to BitHorde, a new "*-l*" option to bhupload informs BitHorde of the local path of an existing file on disk.

This is great news for anyone interested in using BitHorde, while keeping assets visible in the normal filesystem for other applications.

After a great idea from our kind [hosting sponsor](http://piratplatsen.se), it is now dead-simple to quickly try out BitHorde.

A demo-movie is now hosted on bithorde.org, on a BitHorde-demo-node, and the example-config distributed with BitHorde is already configured for it. In short, [download](http://bithorde.org/?q=node/5) install and, provided enough bandwidth, enjoy [Sintel](http://sintel.org/) streaming to you through BitHorde.

Full instructions on the [download page](http://bithorde.org/?q=node/5).

Due to the massive improvements done so far in the 0.2-series, I've decided to release a preview alpha1-version.

There are numerous changes, and important rewrites aimed at stability and restructuring for coming features. Some highlight include:

* 95 commits since 0.1-branch.
* Some new features:
- Encryption / authentication between nodes
- HTTP monitor port to see open connections, asset statistics etc.
- Ping/heartbeat to detect stale connections.
* Important rewrites:

Something significant just landed in git-master. Encryption.

Yes, BitHorde now supports node-node encryption, and key-based cryptographic authentication. 4 different crypto-levels are supported at the moment;

* Cleartext. No encryption, just cryptographic authentication. Fastest
* XOR. Not really encryption, just obfuscation, and still very fast. Insecure, but keeps nosy people away with very little performance-impact. (>10gbit encryption-rate on the Core i7used for test)

Late this week, a significant bug was discovered in all versions of BitHorde. The bug, when triggered will cause data-loss. All users are strongly encouraged to update to 0.1.3, containing a fix for this. I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused users.

After an uneventful RC1-testing period, here is BitHorde 0.1 Final release, in perfect time for the holiday.

0.1 is exactly the same as RC1, simply re-tagged. No new bugs have been found, and no changes other than the version number has been performed.

Please give it a go, see what works for you and what doesn't, the 0.2-cycle has begun so feel free to spam with ideas/suggestions and improvements!

As usual, there's the download-options:

[Ubuntu Packages](https://launchpad.net/~rawler/+archive/bithorde)
[Generic Linux Binaries](http://github.com/rawler/bithorde/downloads)

After fixing the quite pressing matter of blocking first-block hash-calculations, 0.1 Release Candidate 1 is now tagged and built.

[Ubuntu Packages](https://launchpad.net/~rawler/+archive/bithorde)
[Generic Linux Binaries](http://github.com/rawler/bithorde/downloads)
[Source](http://github.com/rawler/bithorde)

Unless any more bugs fixable without major restructuring is found, this means 0.1 is soon imminent and work on 0.2 will begin.

Targets for 0.2 will be picked from [this list](https://github.com/rawler/bithorde/issues). Most likely to see the light of day is: