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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?"

7 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. If you are running Windows by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  2. Bitorrent by arcadum · · Score: 4, Informative

    You could make a intranet repository for all data downloaded and have a bittorent posted for each.

  3. Why not cron FTP? by Evro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    rooooar
  4. 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?

  5. 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
  6. Bittorrent by FrenZon · · Score: 4, Informative

    While I'm sure many others are typing the same thing as I use this, why not set up bittorrent; it's nearly perfect for your application - if there are peers who already have the data, then it'll grab it off them, otherwise it'll grab it from the server.

    The source is available, too.

  7. Bittorrent by tzanger · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've grabbed numerous CD images (OpenGroupware, Knoppix, hell even Slackware) through BitTorrent. I imagine news broadcasts and whatnot, if popular, would also do well through 'torrent.