program for on-campus only sharing?

[MrHealer]

i'm searching for a program that would allow us to set up an on-campus only file sharing network. alot of users are essentially downloading the same files, and many of them are shared on the network already, so we would love to have a way for people to be able to search the other files on the network and do organized downloads, rather than sapping bandwidth on our outgoing connection. it is important that this network would not be accessible from off-campus, as many users will not share their files if they risk off-campus intervention and the whole point is to minimize the bandwidth usage so we that can use it for other things (like downloading more files to share).

any ideas on existing programs?

thanks in advance for any ideas you all might come up with...

-matt

[Psilaxs]

I dont know of any filesharing programs that will work over a lan specifically.

But what you can do, is have each user set up a shared folder on his or her computer, using the microsoft windows network specific protocol. Make it read only, and use the built in windows search feature. Search >browse>My network Places> Entire Network

Probably not what you wanted, but it may work out better then you think.

[collideous]

Well, one thing to consider is setting up some sort of mega campus jukebox if you don't mind having the files on a central server rather than on student's computers. Set up a FTP music directory where students can upload songs, and download them if they want to transfer them to a portable player. Then use a site for browsing and streaming the music library. Streamsicle is such a tool, and it's open-source.

Besides that, you could probably set up a campus only Gnutella network or a DC hub. Others here might have detailed knowledge on how to go about setting this up.

[bobhss]

There's a program called Gnucleus which has a LAN version. Find out more about it at: http://www.gnucleus.net/ on the downloads page.

[nukehella]

Hmmmmm so you want to d/l files from P2P,and share them only with the select few?That's a real boon to file sharing.

[isus]

actually, nukehella, i've heard of a few campuses who dont mind internal sharing, but ban big p2p, like kazaa and winmx. so this is probly helpful to the people within the campus and not be pursued vs. getting nailed for using a mainstream network. another advantage is bandwidth... if your campus is 100mbps enabled, but the outside net connection is much less (as is the case most times...), then you have a great speed advantage within a campus's network.

anyway, yea, go with gnucleus for lan's. you could use shareaza or another ip-based rules system to make a little network. just put in your college's ip address's (122.122.***.***) and see how that works.

[MrHealer]

thanks for the input, all...i'm going to start working on it.

and yes, the idea is unfortunately to share only on campus...better some people than no people, eh? the idea is that we will only have to download a file once, instead everyone on campus downloading it without realizing other people on-campus are sharing it.

[zeryth]

Along the same lines as Psilaxs, you can use a program called sharescan to gether information about what files are shared across an IP range that you set. This information can then easily be searched by file/type/size etc., making for a more powerful, fast (since the log of people's files is kept on your computer, so you don't have to search the entire netwrok all the time) and user-friendly approach. This may be better for some people than gnucleus, since you don't have to persuade everyone to run it first. The only problem is finding out the IP ranges of your uni - I've found 7 on mine.

Zeryth