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P2P in 2001
nihilist_1137 writes: "Zdnet is reporting that P2P is becoming more used in business. "It's now over two years since a few underground song-swapping services put peer-to-peer technology firmly at the forefront of the IT agenda... A look back at some of the more significant P2P stories of 2001 shows that -- although not a new concept -- P2P is starting to assume a very important role in the corporate space, as tech giants scramble to succeed in this new market."" Hard to believe that the Napster battles have been going on for two years now.
I didn't know that Intel had released a P2P library until I read this article. There's no link to the library from the article, so I looked it up. Turns out the library is released under the BSD library and is hosted on Sourceforge.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Sorry, but does anybody remember CORBA? DCOM? Or any of the zillion other frameworks for writing distributed applications that've been around for over a decade? A whole freaking lot of corporate applications ALREADY DEPLOYED are distributed applications that, in some way or another, are "p2p" applications. The one I'm personally most familiar with is Tivoli, which was a distributed app with installed clients interoperating via a distributed framework as far back as 1992. Does that make us Tivoli people futuristic super-geniuses? No, it doesn't -- because distributed apps have been on people's minds since networking was born. I mean, duhh. But hack together something that lets people swap ripped songs, and *poof* it's a "new wave".
And does anybody else feel like we've been hearing about soldiers wired together for years and years (and years)?
So, if Napster has been going for two years, how long have *actual* Peer-to-peer programs been around (rather than the old server-client ones like Napster which have been around for ages)?
p2p is good technology, but from a management standpoint, p2p is missing one major portion that the client-server model isn't: Control
Even if authentication is there, if logging is there, management ( at least the ones I have run into) like the idea of a central, impenetrable bastion of information, with big pretty accounting graphs. It is a large firewall to bringing about change in anything other than a pure technology-oriented business.
AWG
4 out of 5 doctors think that the 5th one smells.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Yeah P2P is pretty cool.. A friend of mine has started a web-design business with someone in America (he lives in Australia) and they chat through ICQ (I know its not too good but it allows them to get in touch at a small cost). The guy in America does the graphics while my friend makes the templates and programming, the business is going pretty well as well.
It goes to show you that without P2P software we wouldn't have as many online businesses.
P2P has caught on in a big way since 2000. It has grown from the closed protocol quasi-p2p Napster, to a number of file sharing applications. The most popular & reliable seems to be Gnutella. The most attractive part is that free (as in speech) gnutella clients are available.
,including firewalls and proxies.
The HTTP protocol & Push facilities in Gnutella are great for the firewall ridden. With a search engine on the web (find it yourself), we can download shared gnutella data even with a plain old browser. This feature of the gnutella protocol (backward compatibilty) allows it to by pass the toughest restrictions in corporate gateways
I for one have used gtk-gnutella. That stuff just rocks !. Win32 guys also have a free (again, as in speech) client in Gnucleus. All this leads to one small point P2P is here to stay.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
"One area of P2P that saw plenty of development in 2001 was instant messaging."
Yahoo! IM, ICQ, AIM, etc. are not P2P. They are pretty server-centric systems.
I think I'm going to go try Jabber.
In the old days, our computers talked to each other. I send you a mail, and my VAX sends it to your Sun. Then, everybody put a PC on their desk, and everything was centralized. I send you an email, it goes to my mail server, then to your mail server, then to your computer.
Well, now we're back again! Imagine that! Bring out the VCs! Bring out the patents!
I predict by 2005, we'll see a new form of P2P that uses a Central Peer for maximum performance. Get this folks, we all know how great P2P is, but sometimes it can be inefficient. What if your peer is down? Why not forward your data to a Central Peer, which is a beefy computer that can handle lots of data, and let it worry about the details? So your computers are on the Edge, and the big computer is at the Center of a big conversation. In fact, the Edge computers don't even have to talk to one another, they can just communicate with the Central Peer.
I dub this exciting new invention: Center/Edge computing. I have a patent, and lawyers.
Yawn.
The folks at OpenCola have thought up a really cool use of P2P - to Save a website's Bandwidth Problems. The technology allows websites to send parts of a large file to individual users, and then each user uses P2P to get the rest of the file. I think it's a really cool way to stop net congestion. No wonder they're one of Fortune's 25 cool companies of 2001.
P2P is an abstract model for communication between 2 or more points. It exists in our phone switching networks (~100 years), Internet (~25 years), most common network-based software (~20 years), etc. Does your company use sendmail, or maybe even Exchange? SMTP is a P2P transport. Perhaps you read news? NNTP is a P2P transport.
The notion that Napster (or any other file sharing system) can lay claim to any part of the P2P phenomenon, aside from raising awareness, is absolutely ridiculous. The notion that P2P is just now starting to gain a foothold in businesses is fiendeshly drug-induced.
The hype still continues. Ignorance pervades. What they really mean is "distributed", and even then most reporters are still talking out of their asses.
--jordan
The biggest problem with the conventional P2P programs (Napster, gnutella, and the like) is they may sort by speed, but they never sort by location. These programs wreaked major havoc on universtity networks, but they didn't have to. Chances are that 95% of the data transferred could have been done inside the college network without ever hitting the upstream. Certainly, it could have caused bandwidth issues internally, but it was doing that anyways.
This is relatively simple too. Just measure hops. Find out where the backbone routers are, then separate out any servers that are found inside that router, and give priority to those.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Every indication is that the next generation internet is going to be P2P. Probably a freenet type model. If we have tough copyright enforcement, it will be at odds with this.
If you define P2P to include distributed computing, where a central server tells a bunch of nodes what to do (which seems outside of the scope of P2P to me), then wow, P2P has really taken off. Heck, with that definition, Pixar uses P2P render farms for their movies.
On the other hand, if you define peer-to-peer in a more pure sense, where each node is a peer, doing its own thing and maybe using one or more directory servers or repeaters to find others, then Napster looks like the only winner I can think of, and it's clearly dead now that it's gone legit. Most IM apps look like client-server to me, although they have some P2P aspects such as file transfer... they're not any different from IRC + DCC, really.
I interviewed with a couple of local (SF) "P2P" companies (really internet-based distributed computing platform vendors) a year ago, and they were having trouble selling their concept even then. Yes, there are CPU-intensive tasks out there that companies would pay to accomplish, but they tend to operate on a lot of data, and that data tends to be sensitive/confidential. One company was refocusing on internal deployments only - using corporate desktops inside the firewall to run distributed tasks at night. That mostly solves the bandwidth and sensitivity issues, although in a WAN environment you might not be able to use remote LANs if the pipe to the remote LANs are too small for the amount of data being crunched.
It's hard to think of too many true P2P applications. P2P architectures that don't include central directory servers or reflectors tend not to scale - think back to old LAN protocols that didn't scale well a WAN context. It's the same problem but at a higher level. The more scalable protocols use some form of central servers or at least a group of more centralized peers (routers, PDCs, whatever) to find one another. Pure P2P doesn't scale due to network inefficiencies (think Gnutella without repeaters); pure client-server doesn't scale due to node scalability limits. A hybrid such as Napster or the WWW scales very well, though. (The whole web isn't on one big server...)
With appropriate signatures, open-source software distribution might be a good P2P application. Instead of hunting around for a fast mirror, why not grab it from a peer, provided the signature is valid? Only the signature has to come from the main server (or a mirror).
The problem with that is the same as what everybody finds when using Bearshare, Kazaa, etc. - upstream bandwidth from peers is very limited. ADSL, "56K" modems, and cable modems all tend to be asymmetric, limiting a P2P network run over them to the collective upstream bandwidth. Imagine 10 people with DSL, trying to swap 10 files - no matter how you slice it, everybody might as well be downloading from one guy. A P2P file sharing program called eDonkey2000 tried to avoid the single-source problem Napster and Gnutella face by using hashes to request files by hash rather than filename, so multiple peers can send you slices of the file even if the name differs, and even if some of them drop out over time. It's nice for big files because you will eventually get all the parts from somebody, but it's still slow.
I think that perhaps multicasting is the only solution for this. P2P plus multicasting would eliminate the problem of popular servers being swamped by requests.