Using P2P for Legitimate Applications?

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?"

Comments

If you are running Windows

[Dancin_Santa]

You can use the Agent API to do network crawls like what you are talking about.

But why isn't everyone uploading their data to a central server anyway?

Why not cron FTP?

[Evro]

Why not setup a cron a job to check the timestamp of the remote file and if it's newer than the local copy, download it to a machine in your office, and share it from there? No need for P2P really. I would think such a script could be written in a few minutes, and the file could be shared with Samba, and then everybody would have the latest version. Run the script every hour or whatever.