Gnutella Forums - View Single Post - P2P-Philanthropy

LeeWare · #1 (**permalink**) May 11th, 2004

Peer-to-peer technology gets a lot of bad press but not much attention is paid to the efforts of those attempting to highlight the non-infringing uses of P2P. Since 2002 one company has embraced P2P technology as a delivery platform for content distribution.

This month we decided to kick our peer to peer philanthropy into high gear by investing some
capital into some high speed nodes. of our first objective was to find a high-speed dedicated hosting provider. On May 5, 2004 we accomplish this goal by selecting server pronto as our dedicated server host. They offer starter servers for $29.95 per month. LeeWare Development purchased two servers to increase our node count to 9. It took a few days to overcome some management challenges but basically the integration of these two nodes came off without a hitch.

Provisioning for these new servers basically required the following steps:

#1 personalizing the server by changing its default configuration.

#2 uploading a file sharing package(s) i.e. we use giFT because our servers don't come with GUI interface.

#3 configure, compile, and configure the giFT components

#4 Finally selecting a front-end application to attach to the remote servers for management purposes.

Server specifications:

Processor: AMD Athon 2000+
Memory: 256MB SDRAM
HardDisk: 40GB
OS: Red Hat Fedora
Connection: 100Mbps

Cost Analysis:

2 servers @ $149 each = $298 + 1 month of service per server @ $29.95 each =$ 59.90
Total startup costs: $357.90 the return on investment for this implementation is five months.

LeeWare Development has a huge content library our first major project is to upload the content to the servers. We broke this implementation into stages:

stage 1: upload apps library 2.5 GB of content (79 files) status = done
stage 2: upload wmv library 5.98 GB of content (152 files) status = done
stage 3: upload avi library < 1 GB 14.6 GB of content (176 files) status = done
stage 4: upload avi library >= 1GB 31.9GB of content (24 files) status = pending

Current server status:

Currently there are no nodes online as we are in the process of porting content to those servers.
however, we plan to go live with the service so the content is available just before LimeWire releases version 4.0 of LimeWire.

Community Support:

We hope that you'll support us by downloading and sharing the content you find useful.

Preliminary testing results:

we turned up one of the nodes on the Gnutella network over the weekend and we saw the following which should be very exciting to the file sharing community.

We saw uploads in the 2-6Mbps throughput range. We distributed about 1,700 files in about a few hours. This should allow anyone with a broadband connection to experience P2P in the way it was intended.

I hope that you enjoy the new services and we will keep you posted on our progress.