Closed P2P
Scum and I were kicking around this idea of a closed peer-to-peer filesharing network that is by invitation only. We’d like to be able to share some of our files with each other after everyone splits from school, and we aren’t really happy with anything that is out there right now (for closed p2p networks).
So Scum has embarked on a mission to create one that we could all use. It will have to be cross platform in the most extreme way (there are three operating systems represented in our small group), so he has taken a web based approach. After seeing a quick demo the other night of what he has so far, I’m convinced we will need some sort of client program to handle the actual file serving and indexing. I’d rather not have to figure out how to get a FTP server up and running and keep it secure when I could use SCP or SFTP to transfer the files.
At the same time, it isn’t efficient at all to have a remote server connect to your machine and attempt to index the files you have hosted. It would be much quicker and safer to have a client program that watches for changes in a given folder or folders and update a remote SQL server (MySQL) as needed. Then when a search is initiated on the web server, the user can feel confident that the index is the most recent possible.
The index would only contain a listing of what host has what file. It would be up to the user to launch a client program (maybe the client program initiates the query?) and specify the host and file path to actually get the file. Scum mentioned FTP (which is all he has implemented currently) because of the usual autoresume on failures on so forth. I’m not sure if SFTP can be resumed or not, but if so, that is what I would suggest. I’m not sure if there are SFTP servers for platforms other than *nix, so maybe it isn’t an option at all.
Anyways, I’m hashing this out in my head and if anyone has some input, toss it in …