Slashdot Mirror
Freecache
TonkaTown writes "Finally the solution for slashdotting, or just the poor man's Akamai? Freecache from the Internet Archive aims to bring easy to use distributed web caching to everyone. If you've a file that you think will be popular, but far too popular for your isp's bandwidth limits, you can just serve it as http://freecache.org/http://your.site/yourfile instead of the traditional http://your.site/yourfile and Freecache will do all the heavy lifting for you. Plus your users get the advantage of swiftly pulling the file from a nearby cache rather than it creeping off your overloaded webserver."
Well, it won't be the solution to Slashdotting, as you can't cache a whole site.
You can cache an HTML page (index.html) but all the images will pull from the local machine. You could cache each image separately, but the change would have to be made in the site's HTML.
On the other hand, I don't imagine it would be hard to write some kind of proxy script that grabs the page and changes the HTML to point to freecache SRCs for each image/movie... you could then point to a freecache of that page...
And of course, this all breaks the second somebody has a site that is heavily CGI based.
Still, it's a start. I'll be sure to use it if I ever submit any site of my own to Slashdot ;-) Many thanks to the guys at the Internet Archive for setting this up. You rock!
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
In case of Slashdotting, here's a Freecache link.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id= 8764
/.'d... and hes apologizing for the load.
He was apparently
http://freecache.org/http://your.site/yourfile
f reecache.org
http://freecache.org/http://freecache.org/http://
seems to piss it off slightly. I wonder why...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I should point out that Freecache is in beta mode. By coincidence, this posting on Slashdot here is an interesting way of working out bugs.
This sig no verb.
As their status page explains...
I have a few questions though, which I guess may be answered on the website:
1. Can users submit/upload files to be hosted on their website.
2. Who's responsible for ensuring that it doesn't turn into a pr0n/warez stash?
3. Can users request removal of cached content (something not possible with the Google cache).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Yes, but the thing that you are not considering is that probably 75% the slashdot effect is just people looking at the link for about 5 seconds, and then closing the page and moving on the the next story. This means no browsing, meaning that it is not important if the whole page is not up there. And as far as pictures go, I would guess that alot of people click on the link, even though they are not too interested, see the text, and realize that they are _really_ not interested. So they close the page before they even need pictures.
In other words, the important stuff, like the rest of the site and the pictures, will be resources only used on those that really care, while those that don't get to see a flash of the text for a second to get a really general idea.
After all, thats what the slashdot effect is, a whole bunch of people that don't really care that much, but want a quick, 5 second look at it.
Yeah, that's fine for sites who can expect the possibility of being linked to, but those sites can often handle the load anyway. It those small sites (Geocities) hosted on some guys cable modem describing how he modded his mom's vibrator into a CD player that won't make it. Often times, myself included, these people don't really think about or expect to be linked to.
I see dreaded pictures from goatse.cx in the future. This will break the nice convenient domain name clues that Slashdot gives us, so we don't accidently do things like that.
I think they're looking more for serving big files, not html and inline images. Smallest file size is 5mb.
-- Nothing unusual happened today
This use of Freecache is still subject to the actual problem that enables Slashdotting: inadequate scaling planning. Some sites are limited by the cost of effective scaling failover countermeasures, but most are limited by lack of any planning for even potential Slashdotting - this use of Freecache still falls prey to that primary problem. And who can remember to prepend "http://freecache.org/" to their entire domain URL, including their repetitive "http://"?
n g". More sites will be able to plan for that single change to their webserver config, than will be able to plan to distribute the freecache.org compound URL. And it won't depend on users correctly using the compound URL. More sites will get the benefit of the freecache.org service. And when freecache.org disappears, or ceases to be free, switching to a competitor will be as easy as changing the config, rather than redistributing a new URL.
A better use of Freecache is "under the hood". Make your webserver redirect accesses to your "http://whatever.com/something" to "http://freecache.org/http://whatever.com/somethi
--
make install -not war
Story is only a few minutes old and mecca of Internet caching has already been slashdotted. Maybe someone kid with an old P5 266mhz under his desk can mirror the site for us.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
Is a public available squid server. If you put any link through the server such as:
www.squidserver.com/http://www.doomedsite.com
The public squid will cache a copy of it. On the first access (like when the approver looks at it) It should look at a request and see if it has a recent cache. If it does feed that, if not get the newest copy and promth the user for a refresh or automatically refresh after a set time (5 sec). It will update its cache as the site does. All without having to upload anything. After a few days when nobody is utilizing the cache, it can purge it. Waiting for the next doomed site.
DISCLAIMER: The may be how Freecache works, but I can't get to it
1) because I am at work.
2) as the comments suggest it is slashdotted.
KevG
You must be new here, or you would know the the news is old here.
I wonder why this continues to be a problem. It should be obvious to any judge that a hosting provider cannot and should not check everything that is uploaded to their servers.
It may be reasonable to expect them to pull content that is illegal where they are located, but that should be a simple matter of notifying them, they pull the content, no harm done. They may even be required to disclose the identity of the uploader, after which this person can be prosecuted.
I don't think anything in this scenario is outrageous or unfeasible. What is outrageous and infeasible is holding the host responsible for what the user uploaded. Then why is this the way it happens all too often?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
See Bug 40873 and Bug 18764. Summary is that Thunderbird (mail) lets you view .mht but the browser does not. And there's no way to save .mht with Mozilla.
This would be great if my employer didn't restrict access to archive.org as allegedly being in the "sex" category.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.