Coral P2P Cache Enters Public Beta

Eloquence writes "infoAnarchy reports that Coral, a peer-to-peer webcaching system, has gone into public beta. Currently the Coral node network is hosted on Planet-Lab, a large scale distributed research network of 400 servers. You can use Coral right now by appending "nyud.net:8090" to a hostname. View Slashdot through Coral. Is this the end of the Slashdot effect?"

Not too good for websites

[chrispyman]

While their system would be pretty good (supposing it can withstand a slashdotting) for cacheing large files, it's not very useful for websites. Websites usually have lots of additional images, links, and whatnot, and as is currently, the system doesn't rewrite URLs.

Is it possible to combine this with bittorrent

[Danathar]

Many times it seems a bittorrent tracker is down due to bandwidth issues. If I "corralized" it...could this alleiviate the problem?

Re:Google

[Dreadlord]

Google doesn't covert links in the cached page, you need to dig out cache of every page you want to visit.

And you can't be sure that Google has cached your page in the first place.

It will fail, because business will want it to.

[CFD339]

This system fails because most commercial sites, and many others, will lose the ability to track web usage for site tuning and marketing response. Sites will be built -- if need be -- with specific settings or configurations to confound the coralling of their pages.

Its a noble goal, but ultimately will go the way of the video phone -- which apart from conferences planned in advance, remains a novelty dispite perfectly adaquate technology -- nobody wants a suprise video call because nobody wants to be a 50's housewife who's self esteem is tied to the cleanliness of their floors and their ability to have perfect hair and a matching necklace and top all the time "in case someone calls".

If people don't want it, it will fail regardless of how well done.

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Google doesn't cache images

[enosys]

Google doesn't cache images. Those are often the largest parts of the page. Also some browsers might not display the page at all if they can't load some images.

Plus as others have said Google doesn't convert links.

Re:Is it possible to combine this with bittorrent

[sploo22]

The whole point of a tracker is that it's updated constantly with which chunks each person has available. A cache, by definition, doesn't interact with the original site so you couldn't send your own information. Nobody would know to download chunks from you, and therefore their software would be less likely to send you chunks.

You could conceivably design a distributed tracker, but this isn't it. Anyway, there would doubtless be synchronization issues that would greatly decrease the network's overall performance.

Upload bandwidth

[rsilvergun]

imagine if we all used our max upload bandwidth 24/hrs a day. ISP would need to modify their networks to work around this. At least I assume they would. As it is, many 'unmetered' isps will start sending you nastygrams if you make heavy use of your upload bandwidth, but otherwise look the other way when you run a server. Keep in mind that all these p2p apps violate most IPS' TOS (mine doesn't let you run a server of any kind, and while there are places where enforcement of that would be silly, there's still plenty of room for a crack down).

Re:Not quite, but here is what /. looks like!

[rjch]

Too right I did. It's a fourfold increase in average traffic and anything up to a 30-fold increase in peak traffic. I'm also only looking at the initial blast of traffic (hence the use of the word "instant") which is not as high.

Re:Hackable?

[arth1]

Okay. Apparently localhost is now blocked, at least it didn't give me the reply you guys got.

That's the Microsoft way of securing things -- blocking single exploits as they are found. That doesn't solve the design problem of the proxy being able to contact any host/port, including LAN ones. Just substitute localhost with any host of choice, or even broadcast addresses.

This product needs a design change.

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*Art