> You can even use P2P techniques like DHTs to make it easy to build (and > scale up) your centralized service, taking advantage of the fact that > such technology running on a stable set of servers is much easier to get > working properly than trying to run it on lots of coming-and-going user > endpoints (many of whom won't have public addresses anyway).
I want to point that eMule runs Kademlia, a DHT. > Perhaps that's why a bunch of the P2P-SIP people are playing with DHTs > on PlanetLab instead of on every end-user machine. As for researchers, they need to create a large distributed experimental environment. Now if they could have access to the user's machines, this will be great. Since this is generally difficult, they are limited to experimentation on PlanetLab machines. And nothing prevents them from generating churn on a PlanetLab p2p network, or emulating conditions gathered from measurement traces. > (Plus everyone needs to hit *some* server to find the bootstrap nodes > anyway... keeping them connected to it and not moving anything but > keepalive traffic and the occasionally connection setup, as David points > out, is cheap) The problem comes when media must be relayed through a central server. This happens when nodes are behind restricted NATs. Also, I suspect that the administrative costs and pains for managing 15-20 servers may overshadow any per-month bandwidth costs for connectivity. Nodes need to connect to a central server to get their identity signed by a central server. This must happen to prevent Sybil attacks. A bootstrap server can be co-located with this authentication server. -salman _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
