you know, i've been thinking about the nature of bandwidth, storage and mirrors as it relates to open source for a while as I've seen bandwidth and mirroring discussions before.
i wanted to throw some thoughts out there to this group ... just for fun. feel free to care or not ... it occurs to me that there might be some sort of lesson in P2P, and mirroring as it relates to scaling and bandwidth/disk space sharing. for instance, I am sending e-mail right now from my own domain. I pay a small fee for this service, for which I _mostly_ use it for e-mail. For my fee, I end up with a fair bit of bandwidth and disk space that I don't use. Like most ISP's, my provider allows me to develop PHP until my heart is content. Now imagine ... if FlightGear had a PHP application that I could install at my domain ... and with a registration/setup process I could selectively or otherwise choose to host stuff from flightgear.org. A potential consumer of these goods would never come to my domain, they would always go to flightgear.org, choose the content they were looking for, and under the covers, complementary software to that which I am running at my domain, would pick my site or some other site based on the content type, or metrics information about the capable sites, and would redirect the users browser to the content in question for download. Kind of a distributed content management system. The installed software on both ends would probably make it easy for me to "sync" the goo that I am hosting to whatever the latest is on the "mirrored" domain. The software running on the primary site would make it easy for me, the "donater" to pick content that I would want to host, potentially based on a) stuff I personally care about b) the size of a given "mirrorable" chunk c) statistics that the primary site keeps about how popular particular chunks of content are (meaning it might push my bandwidth limits on my end as the donater) The system would be flexible enough that I as the donater could "throttle" or "shutdown" the content I was hosting if I was getting past my bandwidth threshold ... and this would be transparent as the "refferrer" would simply pick another site out of its list so the user would be none the wiser. It sounds kind of lofty perhaps ... but personally ... defining a basic request/response contract between the primary and "donater" systems over HTTP and some basic UI designs would make it fairly trivial. Then, implementation could be in anything, CGI, PHP, servlets, JSP, carrier pigeon. random thoughts ... Tony --- Martin Spott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I haven't given any thought to soliciting bandwidth donations > > recently. However, that is a very good idea. My sense is that FTP is > > what kills me here. It would be great if we could move the "official" > > ftp site to somewhere with higher bandwidth which could handle a lot > > more concurrent connections. > > Which bandwidth, how many concurrent user connections do you consider as > 'useful' ? > > Martin. > -- ===== _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
