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Coral P2P Cache Enters Public Beta

Posted by timothy on from the will-it-scale dept.

Eloquence writes "infoAnarchy reports that Coral, a peer-to-peer webcaching system, has gone into public beta. Currently the Coral node network is hosted on Planet-Lab, a large scale distributed research network of 400 servers. You can use Coral right now by appending "nyud.net:8090" to a hostname. View Slashdot through Coral. Is this the end of the Slashdot effect?"

24 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdotted already by Rexz · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just kidding.

  2. Google by asd-Strom · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google cache has been a good helper to me for some time.
    So this is not so new to me regarding slashdot effects.

    1. Re:Google by bogie · · Score: 4, Informative

      Google cache tip for you. There is a bookmarklet for Firefox where you simply click the bookmarklet and Google's cache of the page opens up. Its a nice feature to have at your fingertips. You can get the code at the very bottom of the following page, just drag it to your personal toolbar.

      http://www.rentzsch.com/notes/googleCacheHacking

      If the page won't load at all thus negating the above just use the following example to load a page.

      http://google.com/search?q=cache:www.slashdot.or g

      --
      If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    2. Re:Google by doofsmack · · Score: 5, Informative

      Talking about bookmarklets, I just wrote a quick little bookmarklet to redirect you to the Coral cache of the current page. Here it is:

      javascript:location.href=location.href.replace(/ht tp\:\/\/([a-zA-Z\.]+)\/(.*)/, "http://$1.nyud.net:8090/$2");void(0)

      And if slashdot's tendency to insert spaces in long strings screws that up, try grabbing it from here

  3. Anyone see the irony? by bigberk · · Score: 4, Funny

    Of, well, slashdoting the solution to slashdotting? Really cool idea though. Nice!

  4. Dear Lord by over_exposed · · Score: 4, Funny

    I hope this isn't the end of the /. effect! What would we do w/o webservers crashing under tremendous loads?!? WE NEED the /. effect! I hope this technology crashes and burns...

    Then again it might not be so bad....

    --
    "The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
  5. self-referential slashdotting by Shaheen · · Score: 5, Funny

    so it's like this... people click on a link on slashdot, which gets farmed out to the p2p network to get the cached copy, but there's so many people clicking the link to get the cached copy that they are only slashdotting their own computers since they are all part of the p2p network too! now we can all collectively feel the slashdot effect!

    oh, first post?

    --
    You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
  6. Not too good for websites by chrispyman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While their system would be pretty good (supposing it can withstand a slashdotting) for cacheing large files, it's not very useful for websites. Websites usually have lots of additional images, links, and whatnot, and as is currently, the system doesn't rewrite URLs.

    1. Re:Not too good for websites by Coneasfast · · Score: 4, Informative

      links should be (and usually are) relative, eg:

      img src="img/logo.png"
      not:
      img src="http://slashdot.org/img/logo.png"

      or whatever so this shouldn't be a problem

      --
      Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
  7. In case Coral gets slashdotted by Rushuru · · Score: 5, Funny

    In case Coral gets slashdotted, use this mirror to view slashdot

    --
    !
    ^_^
  8. Hosting companies'll hate this.... by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    as will ISPs if it takes off. Right now with bandwidth usage centralized it's pretty easy to bill for it. If you decentralize it with p2p via millions of always on unmetered clients/servers it gets hard, if not impossible. I kinda hope it doesn't take off, since if it does it could end unmetered Internet access...

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  9. Also a proxy... by jelevy01 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This would also by pass any restricted sites your company may be blocking...

    1. Re:Also a proxy... by interiot · · Score: 4, Informative
      There are actually a lot of sites out there that will let you access arbitrary content from elsewhere. Most corporate restricting proxies will block at least some of them (but it's impossible to get all of them). So something that could be as high-profile as Coral is less useful compared to some of the more obtuse of these:
      • google cache (this has been periodically blocked at my company)
      • the internet archive
      • online translation sites (eg. if it's an english site, have the translator go from japanese to english... none of the words will be recognized as japanese, so it will pass them all as-is)
      • several others I'm forgetting at the moment...
  10. Only the top page? by News+for+nerds · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/ caches only the /. homepage. Doesn't it analyze hyperlinks?

    1. Re:Only the top page? by mothz · · Score: 4, Informative

      Doesn't it analyze hyperlinks?

      All the links on Slashdot have the format
      <a href="//slashdot.org/blahblahblah">
      so that they will always link back to Slashdot. Most websites just use "blahblahblah" or "/blahblahblah" for their links. For example, links on google.com.nyud.net are fully functional.

  11. Stats! Slashdot has it REALLY working! by Danathar · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/stats/

  12. Work for CmdrTaco by Dreadlord · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Goatse-links trolls will be back, with slashcode showing the same domain for every link, I think CmdrTaco has some work to do now.

    --
    The IT section color scheme sucks.
  13. Stupid story submitter... :-) by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Funny

    To save their bandwidth, you should've linked to their mirror!
    http://www.nyud.net.nyud.net:8090

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    1. Re:Stupid story submitter... :-) by interiot · · Score: 5, Funny
      In fact, it lets you specify port numbers as well, so you can use the mirror-of-the-mirror too:

      http://www.nyud.net.nyud.net.8090.nyud.net:8090/

      Or the mirror-of-the-mirror-of-the-mirror:

      http://www.nyud.net.nyud.net.8090.nyud.net.8090.ny ud.net:8090/

      They should have posted THAT link to slashdot to see how well the system faired.

  14. "Invalid domain name in packet" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    It really DOESN'T work for a lot of people.

    The problem is that it doesn't seem to be compatible with Microsoft DNS severs. Below is a copy of the DNS log when I issue a query here, on my LAN which has a Microsoft DNS server running on Windows 2000, which then forwards through the University of Wisconsin. You can see that at the end it says "The DNS server encountered an invalid domain name." Perhaps someone who knows more about DNS can tell where the problem is?

    Rcv 10.76.0.2 0004 Q [0001 D NOERROR] (8)slashdot(3)org(4)nyud(3)net(0)
    UDP question info at 014D5A0C
    Socket = 384
    Remote addr 10.76.0.2, port 1263
    Time Query=4338128, Queued=0, Expire=0
    Buf length = 0x0200 (512)
    Msg length = 0x0027 (39)
    Message:
    XID 0x0004
    Flags 0x0100 QR 0 (question) OPCODE 0 (QUERY) AA 0 TC 0 RD 1 RA 0 Z 0 RCODE 0 (NOERROR)
    QCOUNT 0x1 ACOUNT 0x0 NSCOUNT 0x0 ARCOUNT 0x0
    Offset = 0x000c, RR count = 0
    Name "(8)slashdot(3)org(4)nyud(3)net(0)"
    QTYPE A (1)
    QCLASS 1
    ANSWER SECTION:
    AUTHORITY SECTION:
    ADDITIONAL SECTION:

    Snd 144.92.254.254 39b0 Q [0001 D NOERROR] (8)slashdot(3)org(4)nyud(3)net(0)
    UDP question info at 0109200C
    Socket = 408
    Remote addr 144.92.254.254, port 53
    Time Query=0, Queued=0, Expire=0
    Buf length = 0x0200 (512)
    Msg length = 0x0027 (39)
    Message:
    XID 0x39b0
    Flags 0x0100 QR 0 (question) OPCODE 0 (QUERY) AA 0 TC 0 RD 1 RA 0 Z 0 RCODE 0 (NOERROR)
    QCOUNT 0x1 ACOUNT 0x0 NSCOUNT 0x0 ARCOUNT 0x0
    Offset = 0x000c, RR count = 0
    Name "(8)slashdot(3)org(4)nyud(3)net(0)"
    QTYPE A (1)
    QCLASS 1
    ANSWER SECTION:
    AUTHORITY SECTION:
    ADDITIONAL SECTION:

    Rcv 144.92.254.254 39b0 R Q [8081 DR NOERROR] (8)slashdot(3)org(4)nyud(3)net(0)
    UDP response info at 012DB8AC
    Socket = 408
    Remote addr 144.92.254.254, port 53
    Time Query=4338128, Queued=0, Expire=0
    Buf length = 0x0200 (512)
    Msg length = 0x00e0 (224)
    Message:
    XID 0x39b0
    Flags 0x8180 QR 1 (response) OPCODE 0 (QUERY) AA 0 TC 0 RD 1 RA 1 Z 0 RCODE 0 (NOERROR)
    QCOUNT 0x1 ACOUNT 0x4 NSCOUNT 0x2 ARCOUNT 0x2
    Offset = 0x000c, RR count = 0
    Name "(8)slashdot(3)org(4)nyud(3)net(0)"
    QTYPE A (1)
    QCLASS 1
    ANSWER SECTION:
    Offset = 0x0027, RR count = 0
    Name "[C019](4)nyud(3)net(0)"
    TYPE 39 (39) CLASS 1 TTL 1333 DLEN 25
    DATA Unknown resource record type 39 at 012DBC41.
    Offset = 0x004c, RR count = 1
    Name "[C00C](8)slashdot(3)org(4)nyud(3)net(0)"
    TYPE CNAME (5)
    CLASS 1 TTL 0 DLEN 15
    DATA (8)slashdot(3)org[C033](4)http(2)l2(2)l1(2)l0(5)n yucd(3)net(0)
    Offset = 0x0067, RR count = 2
    Name "[C058](8)slashdot(3)org[C033](4)http(2)l2(2)l1(2) l0(5)nyucd(3)net(0)"
    TYPE CNAME (5)
    CLASS 1 TTL 1335 DLEN 2
    DATA [C033](4)http(2)l2(2)l1(2)l0(5)nyucd(3)net(0)
    &am p;n bsp; Offset = 0x0075, RR count = 3
    Name "[C033](4)http(2)l2(2)l1(2)l0(5)nyucd(3)net(0)"
    TYPE A (1)
    CLASS 1 TTL 60 DLEN 4
    DATA 139.91.70.71
    AUTHORITY SECTION:
    Offset = 0x0085, RR count = 0
    Name "[C038](2)l2(2)l1(2)l0(5)nyucd(3)net(0)"
    TYPE NS (2)
    CLASS 1 TTL 1991 DLEN 19
    DATA (3)139(2)91(2)70(2)71(3)ip4[C041](5)nyucd(3)net(0 )
    Offset = 0x00a4, RR count = 1
    Name "[C038](2)l2(2)l1(2)l0(5)nyucd(3)net(0)"
    TYPE NS (2)
    CLASS 1 TTL 1991 DLEN 16
    DATA (3)141(3)213(1)4(3)202[C09E](3)ip4[C041](5)nyucd( 3)net(0)
    ADDITIONAL SECTION:
    Offset = 0x00c0, RR count = 0
    Name "[C091](3)139(2)91(2)70(2)71(3)ip4[C041](5)nyucd(3 )net(0)"
    TYPE A (1)
    CLASS 1 TTL 603196 DLEN 4
    DATA

    1. Re:"Invalid domain name in packet" by mfreed · · Score: 5, Informative
      It appears that the Windows 2000 DNS server you are using is not aware of DNAME records (RFC 2672):

      Name "[C019](4)nyud(3)net(0)"
      TYPE 39 (39) CLASS 1 TTL 1333 DLEN 25
      DATA Unknown resource record type 39 at 012DBC41.
      We use these types of records to aid in redirecting resolvers to nearby Coral proxies (by mapping nyud.net to a "hierarchical" name http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net. The goal is that once you find a "nearby" server, you should remain nearby.

      Given that the DNAME RFC is from 1999, it appears that some old DNS servers do not handle this record type well. We'll look into some alternatives or work-arounds. (Perhaps you can contact me directly to see if subsequent changes can fix your problem.)

      Thanks for the detailed report!
      --mike

  15. Re:me thinks not P2P by Inominate · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not p2p.

    It's 'distributed'.

    Peer to peer implies that the users of the service are the ones supporting it's existance.

  16. Re:Is it possible to combine this with bittorrent by sploo22 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The whole point of a tracker is that it's updated constantly with which chunks each person has available. A cache, by definition, doesn't interact with the original site so you couldn't send your own information. Nobody would know to download chunks from you, and therefore their software would be less likely to send you chunks.

    You could conceivably design a distributed tracker, but this isn't it. Anyway, there would doubtless be synchronization issues that would greatly decrease the network's overall performance.

    --
    Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
  17. Re:Incompatible with logged in browsing by maskedbishounen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sounds like we need a little lesson on How cookies work.

    To summarize it, though, they're set on a per-domain basis.

    www.apple.com can set a cookie.
    store.apple.com can set a cookie.

    The two cannot interact with each other; however, .apple.com can interact with any Apple subdomain.

    microsoft.com cannot access any of your apple.com cookies.

    Thus, nyud.net cannot access your /., or any other cookies.

    --
    "An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."