Some questions. Please help.
 

Ok lets start of by saying that me and some friends would like to make a private network. This network would only has to support like around max 200 users. 30ish right now.

We are having trouble finding something that can fit our criteria and that led me in the direction of Phex. With the right coding would it be possible to:

1. Make Phex very secure from outside nosey types.

2. Share extreme amounts of files, several TB worth for some, without it having much effect on the computer.

3. Download/Upload whole folders at a time or single files. Both are very important.

4. Incorperate some IRC channel like chat into Phex

5. Do all of this while keeping it completely decentralized so no user is forced to have their computer on always and off course keeping the swarming ability of Gnutella protocol.

Thanks in advance for any answer on this.


Sleepless

Of 1, 4 and 5 I know that it is possible (4 with some coding; 1 by setting a strong network-name and maybe incorporating ssl-encryption - ssl needs some coding, too; 5 with a private GWebCache or by trusting that at least one person (not necessarily the same) will always be online to fill the host caches of people again - this assumes dynamic IPs, with static IPs it's far easier).

2 and 3 are questions for Gregor.

Thanks a lot for answers so far.

I forgot to add that we are talking about sharing over entire continents not LAN, but you probably got that from the post anyway.

Some do have dynamic IPs I think, so that would be a mix of both.

We were talking about using DC to do this, but DC is a download same file from one person at a time program and has no swarming abilities. Phex would be great, in the sense that let's say I have a file that several people on the network want, but I have slow upspeed. I could then choose to just upload to the fastest peer and he could start spreading to the rest right away.

BitTorrent is a great way as well, but there is no chat, and trying to incorperate a private chat into a client would probably get us banned from the sites we love so much. Also uploading probably 10-30.000 .torrent files per person would be done sometime next century.

The ability to be able to download entire folders is very important as well.

I think someone with great coding abilities should take up this challenge, it would be a revolution in private filesharing ;)

Hi..

1) You can have light security by using you own 'network name'. But it could be sniffed with enough effort. For high security you need TLS which is not available in Phex yet.

2) Extreme amount of files take extreme amount of resources. If you like it or not there is no way to allow full text search over a big amount files without either sacrifice large memory, much CPU or high response times.

3) Sharing/Downloading folders is something the Gnutella protocol does not offer. It would need to be written in a private protocol extension. The only easy solution I can think of is to share Magma files which contain a list of links to further files to download.

4) I guess there are various Java IRC clients available which can be integrated into the Phex GUI with little coding.

5) Should be no real problem. If any one of the fixed IPs are available it should be no problem to find a way into the network.


Most of the points you like to have need some coding, and most of the coding likely would need to be done specially for your requirements. Except for point 1 the other things are not really in the main focus of the Phex development. Of course if anyone likes to help out and code any of the things we would love to incorporate it into Phex too.

Gregor

OK so I guess this would be extremely hard to do. Especially the entire folder and security part. Think that will be a bit much to handle for us, so I guess the hunt goes on to something outside Gnutella protocol.

Thank you very much both for very swift and clear replies.

Best regards


Sleepless

P.S. anyways if someone reads this and decides to take up this challenge, we would probably be happy to be guineapigs for testing the results.

3) The magma part is already implemented to a good part, so the only thing missing is "export folder as magma file automatically and store in upper-level folder" and "download magmas to a subfolder" or so.

I just managed to forget about doing that as solution.