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uServ -- P2P Webserver from IBM
ryantate writes: "Some folks over at IBM have been working on the uServ Project, which provides "high availability web hosting ... using existing web and internet protocols", meaning you can serve a website from your desktop and people can get at it with a standard Web browser and without special software. They claim the system, which works from behind firewalls and when you are offline (provided you can convince other peers to 'replicate' your site), is in active use by about 900 people within IBM. Here's the white paper."
Only AOL Time Warner Turner, News Corp, Verizon and Oprah should be allowed to make Web pages.
Everyone else doing it will just mess stuff up!
tcd004
I can't wait to see the RIAA try to sue IBM. God I love this industry ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Freenet already does all this, and in addition, provides for complete anonymity and encryption. It can also be tunneled over just about any other protocol (instead of being limited to HTTP like uServ). It is still under heavy development, but already contains a wealth of information. This is one of the few truly great open-source projects in development today.
... but relevant
sic transit gloria mundi
If this were a freeware/shareware/open source P2P web hosting program, I'd be thrilled. In fact, I would already have a web page up on it, because I've been looking for just such a solution. But a closed source program that I have to pay a subscription fee for, with a larger fee if I want its fullest abilities? Compared to a hosting service that wants a subscription fee but doesn't take up my internet connection or bog down my computer with continuous server processes, this "P2P Web Hosting (Subscription) Service" is just reinventing the wheel by making it a triangle.
The whole thing just seems... kind of stupid.
(subject line spoken in a gruff voice like in the old Wendy's commercials)
I guess that "billion dollars spent on Linux" must be going towards buying IBM execs bigger leather chairs and fine art to decorate the hallways.
If they want the advantages of Open Source community, they ought to try being part of the community. Lameness.
This is slightly similar to my Reptile project which was covered a while back on slashdot
The major difference is that we are reusing existing P2P protocols and will provide bindings for JXTA, Freenet, Jabber, etc.
Content is syndicated in between nodes as XML (RSS, etc). An index is kept of all the content so you can run local searches. Actually we use Hypersonic SQL so you have a very FAST in-memory index of all this stuff.
Users publish information into the system by adding a item to their local weblog. Remote users can subscribe to this channel and will receive updates via the P2P layer.
We are also working on a reputation, and distributed public key authentication model. This is obviously very tough and we have been working at it for a while...
Hopefully we will have another release out soon.
Anyway.. check it out!
uServ only needs a central server to locate individual web servers and set up dynamic DNS accordingly - e.g. to find a replica when the master site is down, or to find a proxy that can accept incoming connections for a firewalled machine. The actual access to web servers is always done via dynamic DNS and HTTP, so there is virtually no cost to the central server (it's only used as machines log in and out of the system, or change proxying/replication relationships).
The central server (i.e. admin server and dynamic DNS service) could be very low cost - something like the cost of dynamic DNS, which can cost from $0 to $25 per year. Someone like TZO.com could easily offer this (they do a good dynDNS service already).
The reason this is better than a free hosting service is that you don't subject your readers to adverts, and you can host whatever content you want. The one thing that's missing from this is dynamic load balancing - if you could have 100 other sites replicating a popular open source software site, and have people automatically connect to a nearby low-load site, this would basically *solve the mirroring problem*. If you can make the creation and use of mirrors completely automatic, the non-corporate Web can easily scale to much higher volumes than today, without having to make mirrors visible to the user.
This does take up more of your bandwidth than central hosting, but that's the whole point of P2P - if this is a problem, apply rate limiting in the web server or the network. Most people use a lot more downstream bandwidth when surfing, so all you need to do is to reserve some bandwidth for upstream ACKs and upstream email - the remainder can be used for P2P serving without problems.
Open source hosting is very reliant on Sourceforge and on people paying for web hosting services - it would be great to see it scale through the application of standard protocols and some smart software. Freenet is a much more radical approach, of course, with some interesting features, but it requires a new client or that someone hosts an HTTP to Freenet gateway - probably both approaches will fit into different niches.
this story sounds like it came right out of the Slashdot Story Generator
Hmmm... I think it's been mentioned that this sounds like Freenet without all the extras thrown in.
Frankly, there are a few things inhibiting Freenet's popularity when compared to Gnutella and Fasttrack (Is that still running?).
1. High learning curve: Trying to figure out how to search for freenet keys is a bit of a challenge, especially compared to typing in "Matalika" in a Morpheus or Gnutella search window and getting dozens of relevent matches from Lars and co.. You don't have critical mass until you have the morons.
2. Difficult install: I have yet to see a Freenet implimentation that didn't require an attendant JRE install of some kind. Worse, it also frequently entails setting up Java class paths, a task that can confuse even Java developers from time to time. Then a user must understand that he usually has to use his or her browser to access Freenet. There is no 'Freenet' icon to point and click.
3. Difficulty of sharing: It's possible to make entire web pages available via Freenet, but if a Freenet user is firewalled for any reason, it really harms him in terms of being able to participate in the sharing.
4. Unpopular data doesn't propogate: Because the most popular data is shared and replicated most frequently. Warez and mp3s show up, but things like dissident and political theories, text files, and more personal data are lost... even to those who might be interested. (Oddly, Hotline is still a very good place to find these sorts of things. IRC fserves, as well.)
From what I read of the white-paper it looks like this project, or an open-source project very similar to it, could solve these problems and still acheive many of Freenet's goals.
Maybe the OSS community should look into something like this... a moron-safe, web-based file sharing project for the masses that ignores anonymization and encryption in order to gain a more critical mass. Better yet, because of the similarity between the two projects, once the sharing infrastructure was in place, it could accept a Freenet plugin, or vice-versa.
Just an idea...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Hi. I work at IBM, and I think you guys are looking at this the wrong way (i.e. the Napster "gimme all your mp3s" perspective).
When your company has 300,000+ employees, communication can be difficult sometimes, especially when it comes to sharing files. uServ allows you to allocate a semi-permanent "address" for asyncronous access of data, which cuts through several layers of beurocracy (requesting webspace, etc). Lotus Notes doesn't quite cut it for this type of usage..
The point is not to anonymously share MP3s.
In a standard corporate intranet, what is the preferred method to share files between end users? Far as I can tell, there isn't one. That's the point. Same goes with home users.
Sure, we can email things. But, as pointed out in the whitepaper, this uses third-party resources -- a mail server.
FTP? Ok, you teach joe computer user to ftp a file to you -- oh, where are you gonna put it? You need a server somewhere to put it on.
This thing is designed for average computer users who want to share stuff -- like pictures and log files -- but don't want to take the time to install a web server (or can't tackle the learning curve, or can't install a web server because they've got no static IP, etc, etc.)
Have a read of the whitepaper linked in the article. It's actually quite a neat idea.
BN