Azureus: LAN peer finder

Azureus is definitely one of the more popular torrent clients out there, and it just became a lot cooler in my eyes: I finally explored the LAN peering plug-in that it is packaged with. This is way beyond cool and accomplishes the equivalent of link bonding using torrents. So, essentially, consider the following scenario:

• You have two PCs on your local network.
• You have two Internet connections (both 1Mbps, for e.g.), one for each PC.
• You primarily use torrents to download stuff.
• However, even though you have access to a bandwidth in total of 2Mbps, you can only download at 1Mbps on each computer.
• The above also means that you cannot leech 1 large torrent at 2Mbps and can only download 2 large torrents at 1 Mbps each. This is not really that cool.. as you want to get something down as quickly as possible.

By setting up Azureus' LAN plug-in:

• If both your PCs are set up to download the same torrent, they will essentially be peers in the swarm.
• While normally, peers would be limited to the upload speeds of their Internet connections, your two PCs are also connected via your local network.
• Therefore, they will start intelligently exchanging data over your LAN (100 .. 1000Mbps), and form what can for our purposes be called a bonded 2Mbps link.
• Moreover, this will give your ratios nice boost :P although it might not be wise.

and, there you have it ..