[Gllug] giFT: Kazaa/Morpheus replacement

[Robert McKay]

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Paul Brazier wrote:

> > Some of you may have used giFT in the past.  It's a file sharing
> > system that was originally based on the FastTrack network, allowing it
> > to work with Morpheus and Kazaa.  Since those networks became closed,
> > it's since become a network in its own right and it works really well!
>
> How does it compare with gnutella in practice?
>
> Paul.

The difference is giFT/OpenFT works. In recent months 50% of all gnutella
downloads never even get started much less finish. Almost every download
on gift's OpenFT network is eventually fulfilled and searches are
lightning fast. (<5 seconds)

That situation might well change if suddenly thousands of leeches descend
on it though. There's only about 100 nodes at the moment but most of them
are very good quality, serving several gigs each.

Due to the giFT daemon running in the background it encourages people to
leave it running all the time. You can connect/disconnect the UI as much
as you want so you can just submit file orders and if it takes an hour to
fill or a week the giFT daemon just takes care of it behind the scenes and
eventually you'll have the file. Think of giFT like your MTA (SMTP server)
and the UI is like your MUA (mail client).

There are no distributions of giFT yet as it's still in early development
so you have to get it from the cvs (expect to do frequent updates).

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/gift login
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous at cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/gift co giFT
cd giFT ; ./autogen.sh ; make ; make install

that's the giFT server which runs in the background and shares files and
manages your downloads. In order to submit orders this daemon you need a
front-end UI. Included with the daemon is a gtk ui and also a perl
command line one (giFT-shell). Or you can get gift-curses:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/giftcurs login
cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anonymous at cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/giftcurs co giFTcurs
cd giFTcurs ; ./autogen.sh ; make ; make install

One minor problem with running a node is it will use up all your bandwidth
as people start downloading from you. In order to mitigate this I've found
linux' tc QOS is a pretty good solution see
http://www.prout.be/qos/QoS-connection-tuning-HOWTO.html.  It still sucks
up all my bandwidth but all MY connections get priority and giFT gets the
leftover so it's not detrimental at all. Now my cable modem activity LED
is just on solid orange 24/7.. sucks for NTL but doesn't affect me. I
expect this sort of thing will eventually lead to meetering of bandwidth
but since it'll happen anyway we may as well milk it while we can.

-Robert.



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