AFAIK the current mechanism of providing seednodes to new nodes is to make a dump of hawk's routing table at a given interval and provide that as seednodes.ref. That way all new nodes get more or less the same set of references. No single node's table is dynamic enough to provide sufficient diversity, not even hawk's.
Gnutella has been using the so-called GWebCache system to provide entry points for new nodes to the network. A gwebcache is a script written in php (asp and coldfusion implementations exist too) that serves references of other nodes. Every script keeps track of other scripts and they all synchronize to make sure they provide as diverse set of references as possible at any given moment. During installation, the new node queries several gwebcaches and they reply with references to other nodes. Once the node is up and running, it never queries the gwebcaches unless it runs out of references (which doesn't happen in freenet i think). Even if several nodes join the network at the same time, they would all get differing sets of refs, which beats getting them from hawk's table. It would be pretty easy to hack the gwebcache script to serve freenet refs instead of gnutella refs. Also, no changes to the freenet node are required, only to the installation and/or update scripts. Running a gwebcache should not require lots of bandwith even during a slashdotting; there are between 20 and 50 gwebcaches for gnutella and they serve a network of 100 000 users (every node connects to about 5-10 caches initially, whose addresses come with installation). Of course gwebcaches are not a long term solution; just something that can be implemented fairly quickly and will help integration of new nodes in the network until some other mechanism (in-freenet perhaps?) is implemented. If there are no serious objections to this I would like to try and do it. Zlatin P.S.: here' the website: http://www.gnucleus.net/gwebcache/ _______________________________________________ devl mailing list devl at freenetproject.org http://hawk.freenetproject.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
