Randpeer - Technology

For starters we recommend that you read about the background of our project, then about our research and then perhaps about our layer model. Our download page also contains a video of a talk and some slides that together form an easy introduction to p2p technology.

On this page we collected some texts that are too short to need separate pages.

The Randpeer library

The Randpeer library is a module that takes care of the following tasks in a p2p application: It runs the p2p network by talking with other such modules/nodes over the Internet using TCP and/or UDP. It reads and writes its own init files, log files and other such data files on disk. It reads, writes and creates files that are being transferred. And it takes commands from the application and reports back to the application. It causes no output to the screen what so ever.

The Randpeer library is coded in C++ but mainly in a modular style, not an object oriented style. The library will in the first round be available as a DLL for Windows. In the future we also hope to make it available as an easily portable daemon for Windows and Unix. (Daemon as in a program without any user interface, that runs in the background, and then other programs talk to it over a local TCP/IP connection.)

Admin interface

For programmers that use the library there is an administrators interface. The admin interface is reached by starting up the library and then telnet into it from the same computer. There are really only two administrator tasks: Creating / setting up a new application network for a new application, and take a look at statistics for an old running application network. There are different ways to "start up" the library depending on situation. In the daemon case you just start up the daemon. In the DLL case if it is the first time before you have made the application you run our dummy application to activate the DLL. When you have made the application you instead run your application.