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Better Than Bit Torrent, For Internet2 Users?
FastDownload writes "New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy. It's called Logistical Networking and is being developed at the University of Tennessee. Though there are some obvious similarities to Bit Torrent, Logistical Networking uses fixed, shared infrastructure
instead of being peer-to-peer, which makes it useful for moving big content even when no peers
are available."
Especially for legal content... bit torrent has made it so that you can get all sorts of legal content like game demos, linux distros, etc. off p2p without having to be on horribly slow ftp servers.
I was considering setting up a download of a database dump for hostip.info using BitTorrent, but it's too awkward to create, and there's no guarantee that there's any saving, as far as I can see (people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle). Instead, I let people download the meta-data, and construct the DB - much faster :-)
The idea of fixed nodes is less "cool" I guess, with less of the "dynamic network adapting to the load", but probably more useful...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
You'll get is when you pay cubic buttloads of cash to hook yourself up. You think that $45 Cable ISP fee is arbitrarily set?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
That is definitely not true. Bit Torrent has a lot of legitimate uses. I used Bit Torrent to download an ISO for clusterknoppix and the multi-disk ISO's for red hat when their servers were swamped. Bit Torrent is a great concept that is not going to be going away. It's sort of like multicasting over the traditional internet structure. I see BT only growing is variations and uses in the future both for good and bad.
Belive in Technology and AMAZE yourself. -- RIP ZDTV/TechTV
Oh, and as soon as Freenet gets N.G Routing working nicely, BitTorrent will be obsolete [/flamebait] ;-)
I'd hardly call this "better than bittorrent". While the principles may be similar, the target users are entirely different.
Bittorrent is for people who can barely afford to run their one server, and need others to take some of the load off.
This seems to be targeted at people who can set up a whole bunch of servers in a bunch of locations, and just want to use them efficiently to deliver huge content very quickly.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
This new thing looks like each site has a piece of your data. If one site loses everything, then wouldn't any file that had even a piece of it in that site be forever lost? Sounds like a distributed RAID0 (stripe) array to me. And everyone knows that reliability of those goes down as you add more stripes....
It's not clear to me how this would actually work
for a real Site, since you'd either need a Plugin
for you browser or at least BitTorrent installed.
Also, this would greatly increase loading
times on your website ( granted - a fully-loaded
webserver won't be doing any better ) especially
when using lots of graphics as each of them
needs to be downloaded from a P2P network.
As you might know, latency is rather bad on
P2P.
Overall, I don't think this would be a huge
advancement, as for now, its just not suited for
that purpose.
Freenet merily uses n times the amount of data being moved in bandwidth passing that data up a chain of nodes to preserve anonimity.
That's the whole point of Freenet! It's not designed to be the easiest way to get the latest DVD rips, it's designed to be a way to communicate 100% anonymously, for example if you're living in a repressive regime, and you need to send a message without getting killed.
Yes, if you absolutly positivly need to be anonymous Freenet is the way to go. But the parent was talking about Freenet making Bittorrent obsolete, which is never going to happen because Freenet has to sacrifice too much efficency to maintain anonimity.
imo all three posters are correct; mixing bt into apache should allow a simple process for sharing a number of files (ideally just dropping them into a dir & running some indexer?), whereas one would otherwise need a running bt (seeder) for each shared file (other solutions?) all the time.
seems to be good for 0day stuff and rare files alike.
though making a browser render a page out of a bt tmp-download dir might be possible, surfing exp would probably be nowhere near 'fast'.
What's internet2 ???
The idea would likely be to have the plugin only kick in for either certain mime types, or content above a certain size, at least for today. Yes, currently you need to have a bittorrent client installed, or integrated into your browser, but the content is at least available in a slashdot-like situation. I agree that it's likely HTML or small image files will never usefully be conveyed by this mechanism, but larger files, or any content that's rendered inline in a page would benefit.