File sharing software

[Claes Wikstrom]

Jay Nelson wrote:
> Everyone seems to be using digital cameras and video cameras.  They are 
> emailing the results among family and friends.  A new group of companies 
> is providing a file sharing alternative instead of email, that is built 
> on peer-to-peer or even bit torrent:
> 
> http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/01/technology/business2_launchpad0501/index.htm 
> 
> 
> This should be a no brainer type application for erlang, except for the 
> big install. 

Martin Bjorklund and I had this great idea for a p2p app
where Erlang would be an ideal implementaion technology.
We (The erlang community) always seem to be on the lookout
for this killer app, which is the one that makes Erlang
widespread, famous ... etc.

Anyway, the idea was to implement (originally it was
an NFS server) a virtual SMB server. From the point of
view of the clients, doing things like smbmount, "Map
Network Drive" or Mac Go -> smb://myserver, it would just be
another smbserver. The smbserver shouldn't serve files, but
rather it should serve files from a virtual network of
nodes connected with tunnels.

The first application would be to just connect together
a bunch of friends homenetworks, thus easily sharing
copyrighted material over encrypted internet tunnels.
The tunneling technology would have to be homegrown.

It would be easy to export different views, it would be
possible to have a WebUI interface to the smb server to control
it .... whatnot.

I still thing the idea is brilliant, it would install as
a daemon on unices and as a service on win32. No GUI.
It would be small.

Bandwidth can be calculated, and it would be possible to
look at a streamed movie which resides at my friends HD.

Portnumbers should be allocated in such a way, so that
traffic shaping (tc in linux speak)can be easily and automatically
applied to the  bulk traffic, thus ensuring a certain bandwidth once you have
started to watch a movie.

Perfect NAT traversal is a must.

Lots and lots and lots of work, but I think it may be the
killerapp we're looking for. Neither Martin, nor I are even
close to have the time to work on it though. We started, but
last 12 monthes we haven't done anything with it.




/klacke




-- 
Claes Wikstrom                        -- Caps lock is nowhere and
http://www.hyber.org                  -- everything is under control
cellphone: +46 70 2097763