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[perkiset]

Does anyone have any experience with private shared networks ala Napster?

Purely hypothetically, lets say I have a :cough: friend that has hundreds of DVDs that he has ripped and would like to share them with his family. :cough cough - wow, gotta get that looked at: He might have a spare machine with some spare bandwidth and would like to make an invite only network to make it easier for his children to move movies to their iPhones. Additionally, his children may have ripped movies that he'd like to be able to browse as well. Obviously, open source freeware is top of the list for importance as well as security. Must be *nix.

Thoughts anyone?

[flyer9753]

I assume you want it "napster" style so you get the peer-to-peer benefits? Files exist in multiple locations and speed is spread throughout the seeders/downloaders?

You could do it quite well with Azureus. You'll just be setting up a private .torrent network

Runs on Linux (or anything Java compat.)
Serves as both a client and a server - .torrent server and I believe a web torrent server as well but not sure how secure that is
supports "friends"

then just make the torrent web site you set up to list the files available private by .htaccess with a username and a password. If you want to be really anal, turn on ssl with a local certificate. Users will get a certificate warning but at least when they are surfing the list of torrents and downloading the actual torrent, it would be https:

At first your not really going to get much in the way of bandwidth savings since the peer group will be small, but this way as you grow the network will get more and more efficient automatically.

And yes I will expect access    I have about 200 I could contribute - a combination of rips and actual ISO/NRG/BIN of the DVD

[perkiset]

The napster part was because I liked the centralized server for "what's on the net" - that was always a superior feature of Nap over Gnutella et al. The cascading p2p nets are strong and hard to detect/trace but are less than stellar from a usage perspective.

If I read correctly, then Azureus is a true P2P in the spirit of Gnu, so no centralized server, correct?

@ access. Dunno man. You looked pretty  when I saw you. The jack boots and bald head were a dead giveaway     

I've handbraked mine into MP4s. Sometimes, MacTheRipper is employed to :cough: backup :cough: discs that are a little more persnickety.

Torrents are cool, but we certainly won't have enough folks (and folks with the same file) to make a difference - so having a centralized repository system will be my preference. I mean my friend's.

[perkiset]

OK, here's another thought.

This network would be really small. Odds that people will be on at the same time are low, thus the fundamental problem of searching and seeing what's available within the network. The downside to ALL of the P2P nets is you can only search the machines that are connected.

I think an interesting alternative would be a P2P that, when you hooked up, indexed what you had to offer and collected that into a central repository with a marker of who owns it. Then private arrangements could be made for machines to go online using the P2P client of choice.

Perhaps employing a P2P client at the beginning is over complicating things. I wonder if a simple private site that allowed for people to append/search a database is all that's necessary. Then, simply using IM you could make a bootD call (Oh c'mon... that was pretty damn funny) requesting that the other person go online for a while so you can have file swap sex.

Hmmmm....

[perkiset]

Further thought:

What it if this was simply an SMF plugin, so that all the user stuff could be managed through an established interface? It's obviously already got PM and attachment to IM et al attributes of a user. Groups and such would be automatically handled... what is necessary is the application part, not that tough really. As a private board, conversations would automatically be private to that sort of thing...

Hmmm....

[flyer9753]

well yes and no - after reading the ideas.

You could do it torrent wise and everyone runs thier own torrent client/server - decentralized and "secure"

Yes torrent/file availability will depend on clients/servers connected, but that is no problem, because you then also set up a web site, password protected, that people upload thier torrents too. Like isohunt, just instead of you going out and indexing them, they upload the torrents they have created and want to share.

Then they (the actual files, not the .torrent) can go on and offline as needed, the torrent is still searchable, indexed and downloadable, and then the files become available on the "private" torrent network whenever a client who has them comes online.

If you as the person looking for the files is online at that time, the download would then start automatically since you already queued the torrent you downloaded from the website.

This way, over time you are not limited, file redundancy becomes automatic as files get spread throughout the peer group and as the peer group goes it just gets better and better in almost all respects.

Why reinvent the wheel?

Unless a central repository were setup somewhere, with enough storage space to hold whatever is put on the network, the actual file availability will always depend on a client who has the file being connected to the network. Central repositories are expensive and messy from both an administration standpoint and a legal one.

btw - you can do it without being peer to peer to start, just set up one Azureus server/tracker - then add new trackers to the "network" as you can. The setup is pretty much the same.

I'm a bigg movie buff so I don't mind the space to store a true digital copy with no loss - I have 2 500gb drives here deicated entirely to my media library and will be adding more soon. Some music too

[flyer9753]

I guess you could do it as SMF plugin - I know of several board plugins that allow file storage and private files - but then again you are becoming the repository of the file possible - bad legally and pretty easy to find.

A .torrent file is another thing and a private .torrent network is hard to find unless your traffic is being sniffed, but if they are to that point in looking at you, you are already pretty much hosed unless you want to run and onion network, but you need more nodes.

[flyer9753]

@ access. Dunno man. You looked pretty  when I saw you. The jack boots and bald head were a dead giveaway     

hehe.... I won't tell you what I used to do for a living then.......  ..... ....... ......

[flyer9753]

use the board for storage of the .torrent, either in a file area or a forum and attached to a message.

Then the network takes over as clients go on and offline automatically. If you want to bootD someone out of bed to start seeding the file you still can.

[perkiset]

hehe.... I won't tell you what I used to do for a living then.......  ..... ....... ......

Oh do tell! You'd be surprised what a breadth of folks we have here...

[perkiset]

use the board for storage of the .torrent, either in a file area or a forum and attached to a message.

Then the network takes over as clients go on and offline automatically. If you want to bootD someone out of bed to start seeding the file you still can.

Do you know what the legal ramification is of having the .torrents available? Does that make the server owner complicit? Perhaps having simply an index and no actual links to any files would keep things on the un-Bubba side of the jail cell. A "brag list" of what I've got, so to speak...

[jammaster82]

Well a torrent is a little text file and i have found that unless
you install torrentflux (a php torrent tracker that includes
a web seed and initial seeding function) it goes slow until
peer number two comes.  but the torrent flux will actually
act as a client/peer/initial seed on the php server if there are no other seeds
running.   opentracker is a simple tracker thats written in php
and i have used.

I think that you need that initial seeding function of torrent
flux for what you want to do because the way the torrent
works is to prevent leeching, inother words in some roundabout
way they wont let you get all the file until you at least reproduce
yourself in the peer list cause most people hang on to the
p2p network only until they get the file then they split.  and
this way your never giving but random pieces of the file and never
the whole file so i dont know if they could prove that an individual
peer did anything but contribute to the entire file that someone else
may or may not have collated on their end.... the proof is so far scattered
and the gnu networks are still getting hosed and they riaa is still there but
the torrents are still generally wide open for movies although im sure that
will change...

:you know i want in on this: i think that its okay to copy/distribute/share
software or movies if you destroy it right after you view it or watch it....

      ill be totally available for experiments with seeds but azureus
has serious issues on the mac with not allwoing things to go as fast as you
need to... id emulate xp and use utorrent i have found that this is one of the
few places where windows shines they others seem to cock block the bandwidth
no matter what connection you have...  and utorrent will also act as a server using
the DHT network (whatever that is.) so that dont have to have a tracker at all
but the torrent flux application may be what you need here. 

I will do some more research into this, if you need someone to stand by and
accept torrents and help you dev i have the time and im down so ping me!!!!

I think i read a thread here on opentracker:

http://www.perkiset.org/forum/php/php_open_source_torrent_tracker-t1121.0.html

[flyer9753]

use the board for storage of the .torrent, either in a file area or a forum and attached to a message.

Then the network takes over as clients go on and offline automatically. If you want to bootD someone out of bed to start seeding the file you still can.

Do you know what the legal ramification is of having the .torrents available? Does that make the server owner complicit? Perhaps having simply an index and no actual links to any files would keep things on the un-Bubba side of the jail cell. A "brag list" of what I've got, so to speak...

Still being worked out - that's what the lawsuits against the torrent sites are now working out. Right now it's that the torrent is not the copyrighted data and it takes an act of the user to access the actual data. If they were to find torrent files themselves a problem then any search engine, even yahoo and the other big boys are in trouble too since if you feed them the right search paramters you can use them to search for torrents just like you do on sites like isohunt.

But those are large sites with lots of access - your under the radar so to speak.

Definately less legally risky than hosting a direct link to the file or the file itself.

[flyer9753]

Jam

Good ideas and you are correct about the needing a second peer to allow you to start seeding the file on to someone else, but I think with azureus you can override this and allow full transfer between "friends" without having to start passing it on again.

I also can test with both a windblows (XP) box here using azureus and a unix (either FBSD or Linux) box - either could be a host or tracker or whatever pretty much.

[flyer9753]

If you do this though, I would not post anything yourself from your account linked to the administrator of the board - that COULD be interpreted as making you culpible.

Use another account or have someone else post the torrent files for you.

However you do it, keep this rule in mind - as the administrator/owner of the board you are under a little different magnifying glass than a user coming in from remote and uploading a torrent file attached to a message.