Murder is based on BitTornado

• A torrent tracker. This tracker, started by running the 'murder_tracker.py' script, runs a self-contained server on one machine. Although technically this is still a centralized system (everyone relying on this tracker), the communication between this server and the rest is minimal and normally acceptable. To keep things simple tracker-less distribution (DHT) is currently not supported. The tracker is actually just a mini-httpd that hosts a /announce path which the Bittorrent clients update their state onto.

• A seeder. This is the server which has the files that you'd like to deploy onto all other servers. The files are placed into a directory that a torrent gets created from. Murder will tgz up the directory and create a .torrent file (a very small file containing basic hash information about the tgz file). This .torrent file lets the peers know what they're downloading. The tracker keeps track of which .torrent files are currently being distributed. Once a Murder transfer is started, the seeder will be the first server many machines go to to get pieces. These pieces will then be distributed in a tree-fashion to the rest of the network, but without necessarily getting the parts from the seeder.

• Peers. This is the group of servers (hundreds to tens of thousands) which will be receiving the files and distributing the pieces amongst themselves. Once a peer is done downloading the entire tgz file, it will continue seeding for a while to prevent a hotspot effect on the seeder.