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Using P2P for Legitimate Applications?

Posted by Cliff on from the not-just-for-mp3s-and-pr0n dept.

scum-o asks: "Where I work, we move a lot of large weather data around and there's always a question of whether someone's already found the data that I need to use (many projects use the same data, but it needs to get refreshed several times a day). My brilliant idea was to use a P2P-like network to search for already-existing data and use that in my app (and if none found, go to the original source). My company has a fast network and I'd much rather have my app suck the data from someone else in my company who's already grabbed the data as opposed to pounding on the public ftp server (which is slow and horribly abused each day). Has anyone found any way to use the P2P-network for legitimate reasons other than just file swapping/sharing and stuff? Also, how would I go about this, can I just grab a gnutella API and start searching?"

3 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Why do you want to make things more complex? by 1in10 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's wrong with the simple solution of just putting a proxy server in to cache the data from the original site?

  2. What about Nullsoft WASTE? by Nagatzhul · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Isn't that what it was designed for in the first place? Peer to peer file sharing in a trusted enviornment?

    --
    "All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
  3. you've got it backwards by Feztaa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    File sharing is "illegitimate" because of the files, not the sharing.

    If you're a small garage band trying to advertize yourself, there's nothing wrong with throwing mp3s of your performances on kazaa. Anything else that you created yourself is legitimate, too. Same with uncopyrighted works (like the complete works of Shakespeare, for example).

    The only real problem with file sharing is that nobody wants that stuff, they all want the copyrighted stuff :)

    Oh, and I downloaded Mandrake, RedHat, and Knoppix ISOs from BitTorrent. Those were totally legit uses.