On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 06:59:01PM -0800, Ian Clarke wrote: > On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 02:20:14AM +0100, Oskar Sandberg wrote: > > I think we do a poor job of presenting the requirements of freenet > > involvement to those who stumble upon it. To use freenet, a host must > > be: > > > > (a) Accessible to connections from the Internet. > > Most people on a broadband or modem connection
...that are not running a NAT or who know how to configure it (which rules out the popular NAT boxes, windows connection sharing etc etc). And just having broadband rules out the overwhelming majority of the Internet's population already - the countries with the highest broadband penetration are still in the twenties. > > (b) Permanently addressed. > > Not true at all. Technically my IP address can change, as it is DHCP, > however in over 18 months of having a cable internet hookup - my IP > address has only changed once. By your definition, my computer would be > useless to Freenet. I didn't say there had to be a static IP. I don't know how long the average DHCPed broadband keeps the same address, but I have talked to several users on IRC who were wondering why they didn't get any traffic and it turned out that they were just changing the IP in the config files all the time (and even that is too much effort to expect from users). A lot of people could meet this one if they set up DNS addresses, but that is a lot to ask, especially if you target users who don't know what DNS is (on the whole, it isn't that people technically don't have the opportunity, it's that it is too much of a bother so they won't.) > > (c) Constantly running and online. > > There is no evidence to suggest that a node can't start contributing > positively to Freenet after just a few hours, meaning that there is no > evidence to suggest that this is true. I have experimented quite a bit with this. After the first announcements, it takes about 24-48 hours for the node to establish itself and start getting a constant stream of traffic. If the node goes down for an extended time during this period, it is pretty much back to square one. Once a node is established, if it goes down for about 10-12 hours or so, it seems to take about 16 hours or so for it to return to it's previous traffic. (I have a plan to use nukes on the moon to slow the earths rotation, but that is not planned until 1.0.) > > (d) Not starved for bandwidth or other resources. > > Well, I download a-lot, perhaps 30MB on a heavy day, on a relatively > slow broadband connection, yet this is just 0.2% of the total I could > potentially download on any given day (about 13GB). 30 MB??? My freenet node alone eats several gigabytes a day - and I never use it myself. It also uses between 35 and 50 megs of RAM, and about half the CPU of a PIII 600 that is dedicated to it. (And all that for sending about 300 pieces of data an hour :-/ .) Mostly this point was meant to refer to non-broadband users and those with metered (international) traffic though (which goes for all of Australia and New Zealand, parts of Asia, and apparently parts of Europe as well.) -- Oskar Sandberg oskar at freenetproject.org _______________________________________________ devl mailing list devl at freenetproject.org http://hawk.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
