(I know, replying to your own email is sad ...)
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.
Since this could be dynamic (I'm guessing BGP and other things like SNMP feeding the topology box) you could then use it to balance traffic flows through your network to avoid congestion on certain links - that's a win for everyone. You could get webbrowsers to look at it when you've got multiple A records to chose which one is best for things like Flash video etc. 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