From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Fri Dec 22 2000 - 12:16:45 PST
On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Strata Rose Chalup wrote:
> A truly P2P service would rely on dynamic discovery of root-server
> equivalents, kinda like Anubis
> (http://www.virtual.net/Projects/Anubis/), something I wrote up in 1994
> and presented at Defcon 2 (my first and only) but never bothered to
> publish 'cause it was so damn obvious. You can put all kinds of layers
> of indirection in there to minimize data obligations (or maximize them),
> use out of band pre-negotiated channels to exchange root server
> information, decide you have transfinite resources and do a subscriber
> multicast ring for root lookups, etc etc etc.
Why in my day (~1990) I was doing this stuff on Novell networks with IPX as
a highschool kiddie. In hindsight the IPX garbage i had to figure out was
way more complex then the "p2p" aspect. And no, I haven't learned anything
new since then, same old same old only with tcp/ip, bypassing firewalls and
other networking hurtles...
Come to think of it, the packet-a to host-b part of this has always been the
only non-trivial part of any of this hasn't it.
> All P2P is just a mapping service between arbitrary-string-A and
> network-reachable-address-B, with however many layers of indirection you
> want to put in there. That's all. No magic. Everybody can be a client
> and everybody can be a server. Just like the OLD net, the one they
> called ARPA, before people got used to thinking of a bunch of glorified
> terminals with 8086 chips in them as "computers" instead of "dumb nodes"
> and thus confused everybody else into forgetting what "host" and
> "server" meant.
*sigh* the old net... may she rest in peace(s)
- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
beberg@mithral.com
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