Napster and other 'ster' filtering thru ipchains

Fri, 6 Oct 2000 00:44:47 -0700 (MST)

> Akamai is a new company doing "edge-caching". It's kinda like having big
> transparent proxies running for ISPs, so much of the data is cached
> locally and it's cheaper for ISPs to pick it up from the local cache on
> the Akamai server than from the real host. I'm probably not completely
> explaining it well.

I made it an effort to attempt to understand what they were 
doing.  Apparently they weren't mirroring or locally caching loads of
data.  at least not statically.  

If for example:

<html>

<img src="http://ak.company.com/images/image.img">

</html>

the canonical "ak" denotes a akamazied server, thereby requesting the
"image.img" file from the closest node.  if the image.img isn't found on
the local node, the node goes out to the real company's website, ganks the
image.img and stores it locally.  These images (or other multimedia
files) have a life span of minutes or weeks depending on certain "meta
tags" .. I don't recall how they were defined.

> 
> If you're interested in such stuff also look at Axient (a local startup).
> I think Axient has a better chance since they're focusing on streaming
> media and other bandwidth hogs.

I think they were focusing on this as well.  one of the incidents that the
guy brought up was the speech that Steve Jobs gave in NY not too long
ago..  

> 
> Akamai's got a cool model. As more places change to dynamic content models
> I think it'll break down, but I haven't studied that or Akamai well enough
> to make an informed decision.
> 

I thought this as well, essentially, it seemed like smarter
bandwidth.. they seemed to take into account all their bases.  everything
from the programming language, the hardware, even down to the last bit of
the users's ip address, which was used for their dual leveled dns 
routing..

> Doesn't matter. On Nov 1 a local company will be launching a new service
> and edge-caching won't be needed anymore ;-).

> Actually, the two models together might be exactly what the Internet
> backbone needs, especially for the streaming media stuff. The two models
> will probably feed each other quite well.
> 
> Gee, I wonder who that local company might be. ;-)

I'm drawing a blank.... <g>

> 
> ciao,
> 
> der.hans
> 