Video Hosting Group

[Ste]

Heyo,

I have spoken to Kornal about thius briefly, and I think it might well work

As you may well be aware, we currently have no place to host videos I have a hosting account which has unlimited space (yes, i want one of those disks as well), but only 5 gigs per month traffic. Now, my FTP traffic isnt included in this.

What I was thinking, if other people would be interested, then I would create an account on my hosting account, and this could be used to upload and download videos via FTP from.

Now here's the crunch: I can't make an anonomous FTP account, so everyone who wants to have access to it would need to have the username and the password. Thus, they would be able to delete the files.

This means, it would have to be controlled who could get the password. What I was thinking was, create a user group, and people can join this. It wouldnt just be anyone being let in. I would need to try and figure out how it is possible to decided when to let people in, and when to reject them. Maybe by having a current usergroup member vouch for you or something.

Would anyone be interested in this for videos, but it couldnt be used for anything illegal

Who would be interested in this, and also be willing to put content onto it?

[TiN]

Some clever peeps amongst us should write a customised file-sharing proggy for BikechatForums. Of course, the bandwidth would be limited (but traffic wouldn't), but it could discourage people from just leaching or d/l the content without contributing to the forum...

Just a thought.
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TiN
dotgems.net

[G]

Hmmm... I'm sure on gnuttela (or whatever it's called) you could specify 'private' groups, that way only members of that group can access the content.

Though unlimited fat downloads from ftp is appealing .... I was just wondering if there would be some way to write a little thing in php to log in to the site and start the download... don't think it would work because the pc trying to download it would still need authentication
Actually if such things can be done in Javascript, you could have a javascript (or even java) thing that could log in and start the download.
Okay there *would* be the possibility of someone deleting stuff.. but they would have to know what they were doing and go to the trouble of looking through the source code etc, it would at least make it a bit harder to mess stuff up.

[G]

Apparantly it can be done in both java and javascript.

[Ste]

Well, the advantage of the FTP access for all means that people can upload as well as download from it

The problem with having it through a script is that will generate traffic somewhere, which someone will have to pay for. By having it FTP, no one is paying

[G]

Well, if it was java then it could be saved, infact there's no reason you couldn't have it so the pages with js would be saved on the client machine.
Was just a thought so that not everybody would have full access to your entire website , also not everyone will have used ftp before.

[Ste]

Hmm, thats true

Are people actually interested in this at all then?

[Bendy]

Low tech answer... You could just *email* the username and password to the trusted people, and change it every so often if it looks like its being abused.

[Ste]

Could also work

Problem is, if things do start to be deleted, I have no way of knowing who did it

And how could we decided who is "safe" enough to be allowed in, and they wont delete stuff

[Bendy]

Can't you set up more than 1 username and password on it? Or simply don't allow people to delete, only read and write.

The idea of a usergroup to manage it is fine, so that's where your authentication of initial users comes from - I just meant email & regular changes as a response the the growing techiness of the replies

Are you SURE your FTP allowance isn't included - they might change their mind when the see us shoving gigabytes up and down

[TiN]

Can't you set privileges on FTP accounts?...you can create standard download-only accounts, and a few "power user" type accounts for the more trustworthy types.
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TiN
dotgems.net

[Korn]

Karma baby! As in you'd need x Karma points before you were allowed in to the video forum.

I could knock up a small win32 app to upload/download stuff without letting anybody see the password, you'd need something along the lines of a packet sniffer to grab it - so it'd be relatively difficult.
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3516 Miles, 11 Countries

[Bendy]

man with a plan!

/me looks at Stephen's karma rating

[G]

I can see the isp getting a bit annoyed if they do notice, as it probably is against their TOS.
IF it does get near or quite probably over the 2gb/day korn said then they'll probably be wanting to work out where all their banwidth has gone.

[Ste]

Muh... they are a bunch of retards, all two of them

/me prods Korns plan lmao

I know they used to sell anon ftp accounts, for like £10, but they stopped doing them when they realised it was unlimited

Korns App idea sounds quite neat.

[andrew]

What about a small Bcf p2p system?

Ive seen other websites do it and it seems to work quite well.

[Ste]

Right, to do a direct connect one, we would need a fast connection to get the hub running on

Then, its just down to everyone sharing etc etc

What connections do everyone have? I'm on single ISDN

[G]

I thought the idea of *some* of the p2p systems was that they didn't have a centrailised hub.

I have 600k NTL cable.

[Bendy]

512k ADSL (256 on the upstream).

[andrew]

Well the new overnet system doesnt use a central server afaik. Anyway even if we do need a central server the bandwidth usage of a p2p server is quite low, its the speed of the clients that decides the speed of the network. Kornel is probably the man to speak to about this but something similar to overnet could be the way forward.

i have

1mb downstream
256kb up

[Ste]

Would it be a no pr0n p2p network, cos there are hundreds of other places to go to get porn from!

Everyone has nice big connections, bar me

[TiN]

[Ste]

[andrew]

Sorry tin my mistake.

Kornel had suggested that instead of setting up our own p2p network, we just put the files on overnet and make a page of links to download all the movies (sharereactor stylee), id have no problem with leaving overnet on most of the time and if a few other people did we could share the movies no problem??

p.s. is this shitty weather getting to anyone?

[TiN]

heh, no problem Stephen/Dru .../me was just after some sympathy

How easy/difficult is it to setup such a network? (the internet has never been my strong point )

Dru: yes
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TiN
dotgems.net