Torrentkino: Realms

I implemented a new feature called realms. What is this all about?

Torrentkino is a distributed hash table. The hostname gets translated into a hash and that hash can be looked up within the DHT. But I expect that many people are giving their computers the same names like Prometeus, Legolas or maybe even Eyjafjallajökull.

Everybody is equal. Nobody owns a hostname. Conflicts may be the result. As a counteraction you may setup an encryption key to isolate your computers from the others completely. But more nodes help to stabilize the DHT and the data within it…

So, here it goes. You only want to find your personal home server from your notebook? You do not care about the others? Setup a realm like this:

torrentkino6 -x bootstrapserver.example.org -r "some strange long string"

The realm affects the way how the hashes are computed. That makes your lookup process incompatible to the others. The computed hostname hash keys become slightly different and also get stored somewhere else within the DHT. You will not have any hostname conflicts as long as you do not share the same realm.

The benefits of realms are, that you can choose your hostnames freely and use a bigger swarm for stability reasons at the same time. Great.