Project Notes


Project:
Spores peer-to-peer file sharing and storage.

Author:
Tom Portegys

Company:
Illinois State University
ITK388, Parallel processing course

Description:
Spores is a push and pull peer-to-peer method of file sharing and storage, making use of publicly available space on the network. A user stores a file by pushing it to a set of peers. The file then becomes visible and available to remote peers that search for it. Spores allows the exchange of folders as well as individual files.

Private and shared files and folders:
Private files/folders are visible only to the local peer. Shared files/folders are stored by remote peers and are visible and available for download by peers that search for them. Shared and private files may be copied between private and shared space at will. You may also choose where to store private and shared files.

Uniqueness code:
To ensure a search or download references a desired file or folder, you may optionally provide a uniqueness code to further qualify the search or download. The target file or folder must then match not only the given name, but also the code.

Properties:
You can specify how many shared files can be stored as well as how much space is available for them. You can also specify shared file extensions that will be accepted or excluded. For example, if you want to only accept .mp3 and .wav files, you would enter .mp3,.wav in the text input field. Conversly if you want to accept all files except .jpg and .mpeg files, you would enter -.jpg,-.mpeg

Connections:
You can edit the initial connections that Spores makes to find other Spores on the web.

Resources:

Paper (pdf).

Java code (zip)