I was reading the Gnutella2 article on Wikipedia today and I noticed both entries in the External Links section point to my sites (crawler.trillinux.org and g2.trillinux.org). The latter being the new home for the G2 specs after gnutella2.com was allowed to expire. This got me thinking that it looks like I’m the only one trying to keep G2 from completely disappearing.
This is partly to benefit others and partly out of self-interest. I don’t think the G2 protocol as a whole is all that spectacular anymore, if it ever was. But parts of the protocol can be reapplied to accomplish other things. For example, at its core is a specification for a compact, extensible tree structure for communication. This could be made generic and used for all sorts of applications outside of G2. The search mechanism of a random walk is not original or unique but it’s the largest P2P network I’m aware of that still makes use of it so from that perspective it could be interesting to study.
I run the crawler out of self-interest. I like data, statistics, and graphs. I never turn down the opportunity to collect raw data and turn it into graphs and make inferences from the data.
I started maintaining the G2 website sometime in (late?) 2005 and moved it to its current home in October 2007. The crawler has similarly been running since late 2005. Here’s to many more years to come.
MoJo | 17-Mar-08 at 1:09 am | Permalink
Hello I presume this is dcat, well thanks for running this and maintaining the crawler and the G2 specs site. It is appreciated, and hope to see this project going.
The G2 specs could even be used for the apt-spoken of DeChat a truly decentralized Chatting network where hubs and leaves turn into chat hubs and chat leaves. Also I always wondered how P2P and AI could be infused together like each individual being part of a Neural Network, G2 could be the perfect platform to study that on.
mosteo | 09-Apr-08 at 8:47 am | Permalink
Wow, I’ve stumbled here by chance and I’m impressed by your dedication, my compliments. I developed the original crawler but had to let it go because of lack of time.
Nowadays the little spare time I have for p2p I give it to freenet. Perchance are you following that project?
dcat | 09-May-08 at 10:32 am | Permalink
Sorry it took so long to reply. I’ve been really busy lately but I finally have some free time.
Yep this is dcat. I added my name to the About page for the blog now to clear that up in the future.
Thanks mosteo for writing the crawler. It has a few rough edges but it continues to run.
A few years ago I was following Tor, Freenet, IIP, and i2p pretty closely but for whatever reasons I don’t as much anymore. It’s an interesting field to me but I never got very involved in it.
pirate | 12-Jun-08 at 3:26 pm | Permalink
I have been closely following your crawler and think it is great work and commitment. Recently your crawler stats have been down and I just wanted to know if you have stopped work on the crawler?
dcat | 16-Jun-08 at 12:30 am | Permalink
It will be back up pretty soon if all goes well.