Ringer: A Global-Scale Lightweight P2P File Service

Whenever there is a need to coordinate on a global scale, solutions which work perfectly on a LAN tend to fall apart. Different ideas are needed. We present Ringer as a solution to the problem of keeping a secure, reliable, simple (and cheap) distributed filesystem working at a global scale along unreliable network connections. Furthermore, Ringer is specifically designed to facilitate distributed document management. This sounds an awful lot like a problem which the Internet and Google (or your search engine of choice) solves admirably already, at least in the case of HTML documents. Now, consider the case of information stored in general format documents – and especially for documents which exist only internally in a company. The PageRank algorithm works by exploiting the rich interconnectedness of hypertext. However, this highly connected graph structure doesn’t exist for most sets of arbitrary documents. Additionally, most information is stored in only a few documents, not 100s! In this context, internet-based search is not successful because the ordering of results returned from a search query is both more important and more difficult to compute. Suppose we have the following situation: There is a global organization (e.g., the UN) which generates a large amount of information, but this information is not stored in hypertext. Furthermore, this information is rarely duplicated across documents. Our goal is to easily structure these documents in such a way as to make adding AND finding information easy. There is currently no good solution to the problem outlined above in the literature. To solve this problem, Ringer has three features as goals: