Gadgetopia

The Coral Content Distribution Network: I don’t have the first clue how this works, but it seems interestng.

Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.

Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects’ URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. These volunteer sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.

The problem is that it runs through post 8090, which limits its use by about anyone behind a firewall. You just tack “.nyud.net:8090” onto the end of the URL. I checked, and Gadgetopia is in the network.

So is this like Akamai? If someone is clear on how this works, speak up.