RE: idea for a much needed application

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mike henley [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 3:14 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: idea for a much needed application
>
>
> I remember a while ago reading about tim burners-lee and how his
> vision of the WorldWideWeb as a medium where all can freely and easily
> publish information has not materialized properly, and i felt it so
> strongly over the past week when trying to look at options for hosting
> a website. Hosts are either expensive or limit you in terms of what
> languages, modules, applications, and OSs you can use. They also limit
> you in terms of space, bandwidth used per period, number of executions
> of CGIs... etc. Some of those who give good deals, seem difficult to
> trust with either your credit card number or your content.
>

Not too long ago, while exploring DRuby, I wrote a set of classes that would
let me expose a URL on my public web site (hosted by a third party, and with
limited storage space) that would trigger a DRuby call to a service running
on my home PC.  The public web server just needed to know my current home IP
address (which, unfortunately, changes since my ISP uses DHCP), and would
act as a proxy for the Druby service.  A DRuby client on the public web
sever would make a request to a DRuby server on my home PC, whch would
stream back bytes.  The bytes would get passed back to the web site client,
none the wiser.

I managed so that one could hit a URL on my web site, and stream an MP3 that
physically resided on my home PC to another PC on the Internet.

In theory it could work the other way, too, to allow data posted data via
HTTP, which in turn would be sent to my home PC via a Druby client.

Now, this was mostly a "gee, I wonder if ..." sort of thing, but one thing I
liked was that I could provide a service on a specific port that would only
accept connections from a single remote machine (my public web site).  I
(and my ISP, I imagine) prefer this to running a complete web server open to
the whole 'net.  (This, though, raises the question of which has better
security for basic operations, Apache or Druby, since I could also restrict
Apache to respond to a specific client IP address. So, on second thought
...)

I put the project on hold, since the bytes passed through my public web site
and racked up my transfer stats.  What I would prefer is to have a stable
public URL that is a gateway to a Drb-to-Drb exchange negotiation, with my
home PC keeping the public site abreast of my current IP address and what
port to use.  (And I think in that scenario all the web server need do is
verify that I'm a Good Guy before telling me the real IP and port to connect
of the Druby server on my home PC. The web server could tell the DRuby
server what client IP address to expect. Then my remote Druby client
negotiates the service directly.)

I did just now take a look at DNS2Go, though, and it looks quite useful.
You could upload files to your home machine using ftp or a web server.  The
hard part, I suppose, in these schemes, is having server software that
allows you to connect and navigate your content, while keeping put the Bad
Guys.  Maybe scp or ssh? vnc? You would also need a way to have DNS2Go aware
of when your home IP address changes.

James, thinking out loud.