At 12:34 AM 04/23/2002 -0400, An Metet wrote: >... and morpheus gets cached >(from [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) > >When you setup some of these peer-to-peer sharing clients (like Morpheus) >you can limit what IP's can share with you. I've set one up and excluded >everyone except our class C. In theroy, that should let my local users >download from the server but not let anyone else on the Internet share. I >like this idea, as it should help prevent 100 users from downloading the >same MP3 a 100 times over our T1. > >However, how do our users know how to find our morpheus server? I don't see >a way to broadcast the server to our users or a way for our Morpheus users >to set their morpheus clients to know about our server. It doesnt seem like >our server has any more importance to them than any of the other 1000's of >morpheus clients out there.
Some of the peer-to-peer systems are designed to do this well; others aren't. Napster wasn't, but because they had a centralized database server, they could adjust their algorithms to avoid being kicked out of universities (which also had the problem of slow WAN bottlenecks with fast LANs making all the users look like great sources.) Systems that can do supernoding can possibly be talked into doing this; they certainly should be designed to make it easier. Unfortunately, the typical metric for Napster-like systems is simply how fast the local connection is (though you could tell it a slower number), rather than how good a path they have to the outside world, and they advertise that same metric to everybody - it's an obvious target to fix. (E.g. give the system some way to advertise a neighborhood, with different speeds inside and outside, and some way to find indexes for the same neighborhood.) Also, peer-to-peer systems inherently tend to serve files from the end system, rather than relaying them through server-like machines. You don't want your Napster gateway to have to cache all the tunes that everybody in the university has on their machines; you'd like the outsider to be able to go directly, unless you build some kind of pass-through. On the other hand, Freenet looks like it may do this somewhat well.
