On Mar 7, 2009, at 2:21 AM, David Van Couvering wrote:
Hm. I am concerned that your Average Joe does not like the idea of opening up their HTTP port, and probably doesn't know how to. Folks used to hackingwith BitTorrent maybe, but that's not the target user I was really considering.
'HTTP port' really just means the port that CouchDB listens on. That's not port 80; it could be anything you like. Opening up a port is a necessity for P2P apps, where there isn't a central server available for everyone to rendezvous through. Fortunately this can often be done automatically by using the UPnP or NAT-PMP protocols to request a port mapping from the router. For example, the BitTorrent clients I've used all do this automatically, so I didn't even have to think about the issue.
IIRC, there is a page on the wiki that describes running CouchDB through an SSH tunnel, which would add more security. I think this would be a good idea for any P2P usage.
(BTW, could someone describe how the replication protocol works? It's over HTTP, but what kind of requests is it sending and what sort of data? Does the pulling server just issue a request for 'every document whose sequence number is greater than the largest sequence number I got last time we synced'?)
—Jens
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