Genny Test v0.20, Wed, 28 Feb 2001 09:05:16 +0000

Greetings,

Code updates:

I've been organising the code and cleaning up bugs and shortcomings, as
opposed to implementing new features.

I split Genny up in to several files, which raised its own problems.  I
think I've gummed those shut, though.

Splitting Genny up into several files looks to make it easier for
someone to implement their own service.  It makes it more obvious what
they need to do to plug it in.

A servant knows not to pay attention to some bad packets now.

A servant can be told its own IP address if it guesses wrong, or if you
just want to override anyways.

A friend of mine has suggested that Genny would be useful to maintain IP
routes for private networks.  It is less overkill than OSPF or BGP, and
it already is its own broadcast protocol.  I admit that I probably never
would have thought of that use.

I'm hoping to release an Alpha version sometime soon.  Genny itself is
extremely stable to external influences.  The webserver will do weird
things easily, though.  Very few user commands do sanity checks, so it
easy to crash the program that way.  So I have to decide basically what
is acceptable for Alpha quality before I do an Alpha release.


Some Genny history and philosophy:

When I started out thinking about a Gnutella replacement, I just wanted
something that did what Gnutella did, only better.

I wanted to be able to do things other than file sharing.  I wanted it
to go faster.

But I did not set out to do what I now want Genny to do.

In designing a working broadcast/reply/rereply protocol, I realised one
thing... This is not just a file finding or one-time chat broadcast
network, this can be a network for any and all traffic.

Genny is a network layer protocol for people who aren't getting what
they want out of the Internet Protocol.

If people use Genny, it will be because they don't have all the
capabilities of IPv6.  (IPv6 solves almost all of the problems that
Genny solves, only better.)

If people use Genny, maybe it will encourge ISPs and similar
organisations to encourage use of IPv6 and IPv6 features (especially
multicast).

I think this justifies Genny's existance more than anything else.

TomG

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