[p2p-hackers] Learning how to build a P2P system

[Ian Wiles]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.58.0502191911410.2130 at westbury.dixons.org>, Jim 
Dixon <jdd at dixons.org> writes

>
>You do understand that Usenet News _is_ a p2p system, right?  One that
>works very well, despite immense and rapidly fluctuating loads, the
>sporadic loss of peers, legal threats, hordes of utterly clueless users,
>and sometimes uhm less clueful sys admins.
>
>Source code freely available.  See for example
>http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/innd
>
>The design is ancient and barbaric, but it works.
>

Yep, I'm aware of this. I used to run a dnews server for some groups. 
I've also seen some P2P usenet based systems, such as Mynews etc.

The difference between my idea was to distribute the spool, which 
doesn't happen with NNTP servers, they more or less copy the spool 
amongst their peers. As I would expect each node to be a home PC (I 
should've mentioned that...) if they each propagated 100% of the spool 
that would be pretty bad for scaling. For example most usenet servers 
now move about 1Tb of bandwidth a day (although this  mostly accounts 
for binaries). Even text only would probably amount to 5Gb or so a day.

Also a lot of usenet providers are no charging for access on top of ISP 
fees (a lot of ISP provided usenet servers are quite poor in my 
experience).

Cheers.



-- 
Ian Wiles