An asynchronous Internet in GNOME [LWN.net]

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 13, 2016 0:04 UTC (Tue) by davidstrauss (subscriber, #85867)
In reply to: An asynchronous Internet in GNOME by gnu
Parent article: An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

> I have been looking at BitTorrent protocol-like functionality in certain applications (video streaming, software updates.. etc..).

Absolutely. I have no idea why every desktop/server isn't usable (via an on/off option) as a mirror for package updates. The packages are signed; we don't need to trust the path of the bytes.

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An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 13, 2016 0:27 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

I distinctly remember using such a proxy. It even used Avahi for autodiscovery in the local network.

But I can't remember its name right now and Google searches come up empty.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 13, 2016 20:09 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

It's been a while since I used it, but I think Debian/Ubuntu actually had a separate package to add mDNS functionality independent of the proxy used. I've used apt-cacher-ng in the past, right now I'm using http-replicator (with non-.deb-based distros, but I think it can do those too).

The reference ipfs daemon has mDNS built in, but I'm not aware of any way to use it as a regular package proxy.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 13, 2016 22:51 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> The reference ipfs daemon has mDNS built in, but I'm not aware of any way to use it as a regular package proxy.

It should be easy enough to set up IPFS as a package source (just use a local HTTP gateway), but some trusted individual would need to publish a mirror of the repository at a well-known IPNS address so others could find it, and keep the mirror up to date. IPFS wasn't really designed to proxy arbitrary HTTP sites. The sites like ipfs.io which can be accessed both over HTTP and over IPFS work the other way around: the IPFS version is the master and HTTP is provided by an IPFS gateway running on the server.

Personally I use squid-deb-proxy, which integrates well with apt and (after installing squid-deb-proxy-client) uses mDNS to connect clients to the server when available. If the server isn't available it automatically falls back to direct downloads, which is nice for mobile devices. The server required some configuration to let it know about extra repo domains for third-party packages and my (somewhat idiosyncratic) local network address ranges. I also adjusted the settings to coalesce simultaneous requests rather than fetch the same file twice. (The default prioritizes small-file latency over bandwidth.)

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 28, 2016 15:16 UTC (Wed) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link]

squid-deb-proxy does this, with squid-deb-proxy-client for mDNS-based autoconfiguration.

It is full of pain[*][+], so I'm not surprised nobody installs it by default.

[*] like shipping a default config file that causes the nigthly cron script to send errors to root because the default list of exceptions happens to be empty
[+] like rejecting all 3rd-party repositories (including PPAs) by default with an unhelpful 403 Forbidden error that apt shows as originating from the real upstream mirror and don't let me start counting the hours I lost while debugging this

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 13, 2016 1:30 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

I think this is a funny comment because Microsoft did this on Windows 10 and received criticism, some people felt that it was a violation for the OS provider to make use of someone else's computer that way, as the feature, to be the most useful to the largest number of people, is enabled by default.

https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-10-windows-up...

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 13, 2016 5:48 UTC (Tue) by davidstrauss (subscriber, #85867) [Link]

To be fair, I did say "as an on/off option." Just because I think it's a straightforward and useful technology doesn't mean I think it should be on without opt-in.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 15, 2016 20:14 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I think this is a funny comment because Microsoft did this on Windows 10 and received criticism, some people felt that it was a violation for the OS provider to make use of someone else's computer that way, as the feature, to be the most useful to the largest number of people, is enabled by default.

I can't make sense of what you say, BUT! If an option to use MY bandwidth for OTHER people is an opt-OUT, what happens if I pay for said bandwidth by the MB. THAT is the problem, not the fact that the feature is there.

Indeed, my ISP offers me the option to use other peoples' routers while I'm roaming. But that is very much an opt-in - if I configure my router to let others use it, then I can use others' routers in return. (And iirc, it's on a separate network managed by BT, not on my home 192.168.1.x subnet.)

Cheers,
Wol