[ale] File share web application

[James Sumners]

Except, it's easy to not recommend things that don't even compare to
the product mentioned. BitTorrent is nowhere near an effective
substitute for Dropbox. A basic NFS share, however, would be.
BitTorrent relies on everyone always running a client. And if only one
person, or a small group of people, is/are serving large files through
BT then everyone's computer is going to be overworked during transfers
(i.e. constant, high speed, disk thrashing).

The requested solution relies on a server in the middle to manage the
synchronization to all clients (participants in a share). That is, Joe
creates a 3GB movie file and puts it in the group share on his local
computer. The 3GB movie file uploads to the server as local system
usage allows (faster or slower). Once the file is uploaded to the
server, the server then pushed the file out to Bob who is a
participant in the share. Joe doesn't have to create a hash file and
upload it to a tracker. And Bob doesn't have to go download that hash
file from the tracker before he can even start to download the file
that is really being shared.

As for how OwnCloud handles large files, I'm not sure. I've only used
it for a few minutes during a trial at work. But if your file systems
and kernels support large files, I don't see why they would be a
problem for OwnCloud.

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 5:54 PM, JD <jdp at algoloma.com> wrote:
> On 07/03/2012 04:38 PM, Robert Coggins wrote:
>> These look nice!  I will test them out.  Have any of you used them with
>> large files?  +2gigs up to maybe 10 gigs?
>
> For sharing large files I'd look at
> * zsync
> * bittorrent
> * "Direct connect protocol"
> or
> * any binary packager that is commonly used on usenet for splitting and
> recombining large files with par2 parity data
>
> Whatever you use, make certain is has auto-restart capabilities.
>
> On a LAN, this isn't nearly as important, but without knowing how many clients,
> how many servers and the total number of big files to be transfered per second,
> it is hard to recommend anything as a solution.


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

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CH:D 59