[Mldonkey-users] Feature request: selective IP range limit lists

[blaz snaz]

Hi all..

Freeking hell mldonkey is just getting better and
better. 2.5 is leaps and bounds ahead of everything
else... I've been waiting to see who would be the
first to turn out the "ultimate" p2p client, with
overnet, gnutella2 and fasttrack. keep up the genious
work developers, lets hope FT dont become annoying
buggers and change their protocol too often.

Got an interesting idea, that would obviously have
many uses other than this, but here is one scenario.

Situation: There is a peering network in Western
Australia called the WAIX, all major ISPs are
connected, and traffic to and from the waix network is
usually considered "local" ie free / not counting
towards any quotas / etc, which makes sense. Also,
most major isps here count *all* upload traffic as
free (or at least the good ones do)

What would be nice, is to have a way to limit
downloads to sources within the WAIX. Uploads can go
to the world, as upload traffic is usually free.

Would it be possible to create a List of IP ranges,
and an extra field for every file download (similar to
priority) and upload "shared directory", which limits
connections to only IPs in the ip range list
specified.

For example:
(options)
iprangelimitlist1=203.59.0.0/16
iprangelimitlist2=192.168.0.23,192.168.0.24-192.168.0.254
iprangelimitlist3= etc

(new command for downloads)
iprangelimit <rangelist> <num> 
      where <rangelist> is 0 (default, no limits),  1,
 2 etc 
                             (from above list)
                    <num> is the file download number

(modified share command)
share <prio> <rangelist> "directory"
        or maybe put rangelist after directory seeing
as it should 
        be an optional argument (like prio) ?
        <rangelist> as above, in the proposed
"iprangelimit" 
                   command..

obviously, vd, downloaders, uploaders etc need a new
column to show what IP restriction list (if any) they
belong to.

In Download Operation, if a download is restricted to
say list1, mldonkey should only make connections to
sources (ie to ask/propogate sources OR download
files) if their IP is within that list. So from that
point on, even though the file may have a ton of
sources, connections will only be made to the IP
ranges in list1.  There should be the ability to set
this on a per-file basis. (obviously some rare files
would need to be downloaded from outside of that IP
range)

In Upload Operation (although this would be used
less-often, for reasons stated above), files shared in
directories  limited to a IP range list would only be
propagated to IPs in that list. So if a client NOT in
the list asks for such a file, mldonkey should reply,
"sorry, don't have it." (because mldonkey is so polite
of course :) )

Good idea? Bad idea? It would certainly help people on
volume quotas to keep their non-local downloads in
check...

Another thing which i haven't thought too much about
yet, is limiting *server* (/ultrapeer/tracker/etc)
connections to IP range lists, much the same as above.
(kind of the oposite to banning server IPs). This way
we could make mldonkey only talk to servers dedicated
to providing sources within a certain ip scope.

^^ incidentally, this is actually working in real
life, a few people have modified emule to only contact
ed2k servers on the WAIX. (appropriately named
waixmule..). I think they are using modified servers
as well, which only return results/IPs for files
within the WAIX..

VERY interested in your thoughts..
particularly ideas for interim solutions and
workarounds (like the idea in the paragraph above..),
as i realise this will be a fairly major architectural
upheaval.

I noticed this issue has previously been brought up
here:
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/mldonkey-users/2002-12/msg00400.html

Thanks for reading!

http://mobile.yahoo.com.au - Yahoo! Mobile
- Check & compose your email via SMS on your Telstra or Vodafone mobile.