George wrote:
> If there are other ideas on how to make mprime or Prime95 less
> intrusive please forward them to me by private email.
Hi George,
I'd send this via personal email, but I wanted to see what other people
think...
One of the reasons, maybe the biggest, that US WEST disapproved of my
actions was that NTPrime was sending data to an outside web site. When you
see 2500+ machines transferring data from a secure network to an Internet
site, sure it might raise some eyebrows at first (don't I know that *now*!!)
I think, for many with security concerns, it would be preferable to set up a
"Prime Proxy" of some sort. The end result of such a thing being that the
individual program itself does not contact the Primenet server, but rather
contacts this proxy to receive exponents and report results. Then, the
proxy could, at the operators choice, either automatically or manually
report to the Primenet server at Entropia en masse.
This would have definitely helped me out big since with 2500 or so machines
all going to one web site, though the data was small, the proxy server's
activity wouldn't go unnoticed to be sure.
By consolidating the Internet traffic in this manner, you get more efficient
use of the Internet connection when many machines are involved. Or let's
say you have many machines on a network that isn't connected to the internet
at all. You could connect via your "proxy" machine over the phone or
whatever, get a block of exponents, and then send your results back for all
your machines once a month or so.
It sounds like a good idea to me, and obviously I haven't explored the
possibilities too much, but that's the general idea.
I know that Scott used to have/has his Primenet server software available
(albeit older an older version), and it would be comparable to that in a
sense. What I'm proposing is more of a simple buffer between the
Prime95/NTPrime/etc software and the Primenet server itself, allowing for
bursts of traffic on the Internet rather than the trickles of small data at
a time that currently goes on, which is less efficient for large Prime
networks (especially 2500+ computers :-), and never mind that this is a
run-on sentence.
Aaron
