Torrent link embedding

Since today, generated metalinks can automatically include links to Bittorrent resources. When a file name ending in .torrent is found, a hyperlink to it is included into the the metalink.

The webserver does all this fully automatically. However, the additional check doesn't need to be done by Apache for every request. With a new configuration directive, a file mask can be given which specifies the files for which this happens, e.g. *.iso. Thus, there is no tradeoff in scalability.

An example of the new metalinks is: http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1/iso/openSUSE-11.1-DVD-i586.iso.metalink

So how can you use this new feature? The command line metalink client aria2 can automatically use P2P resources and HTTP resources from metalinks at the same time. There are other clients, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink.