michael.dillon@bt.com wrote:
... You need a way to insert non-technical information about the network into the decision-making process. The only way for this to work is to allow the network operator to have a role in every P2P transaction. And to do that you need a middlebox that sits in the ISP network which they can configure.
You could probably do this with a variant of DNS. Use an Anycast address common to everyone to solve the discovery problem. Client sends a DNS request for a TXT record for, as an example, 148.165.32.217.p2ptopology.org. The topology box looks at the IP address that the request came from and does some magic based on the requested information and returns a ranking score based on that (maybe 0-255 worse to best) that the client can then use to rank where it downloads from. (might have to run DNS on another port so that normal resolvers don't capture this). The great thing is that you can use it for other things. MMC -- Matthew Moyle-Croft - Internode/Agile - Networks Level 5, 150 Grenfell Street, Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia Email: mmc@internode.com.au Web: http://www.on.net Direct: +61-8-8228-2909 Mobile: +61-419-900-366 Reception: +61-8-8228-2999 Fax: +61-8-8235-6909 "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones" - John Maynard Keynes _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list NANOG@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog