For the purposes of testing, and regarding the thoughts in my last e- mail, I've set up two freenet nodes which are public- Anyone can add their reference to them, without interaction by me.
Note- This is entirely different from the link exchange idea that I proposed in my last e-mail. I still prefer that solution, but that's not something I'm up to implementing. I set up my node by commenting out the ability to run any toadlets outside of the Darknet, and by disabling the ability for fproxy to delete nodes. I then put node on a publicly accessible IP, and told it to allow connections to anyone. This should allow people to connect, copy my noderef, and add their own. I'd love it if a few people could try connecting, and letting me know how it works for them. http://Ubernode.org Going to the site tells you my noderef, and allows you to add your own, without having to go through the Java server directly. By running through a quick apache page, I am able to spare the little server a small amount of pain. This is running on a small rented server, but should be an interesting experience to test. If nothing else, if it works at all, it can give Slashdotters at least /one/ node to connect to, slow though it will be. You can test to see if your node is added, by viewing the list of connections at (http://ubernode.org:8888/ darknet/) but that page is running through fproxy, so it slow. I've set another test/example up on my home connection (http:// akari.homeunix.org:8888/darknet/), but that connection is going to be far less stable, and it connects to the node directly, rather than going through a load-saving page, so will be slow as hell. Really. Use Ubernode.org instead. While I don't necessarily think public access nodes are a great solution for anything long-term, the ability for people to have a few places they can connect without user-interaction has to be better than the ref-swarms in IRC... It's an interesting thought-experiment for me, if nothing else. Just my ignorant thoughts. -Colin
