IDEA: modify Peer Guardian Lite to check site for updated blocklist

[Nobby]

Hi

I have been recommended this site by member here, i am looking for the following modification to be made:

Peer Gaurdian Lite to be modified to allow it to check a website for an updated blocklist, this check would need to be carried out every 2 hours, if there are no new updates to the blocklist available it will simply check again in 2 hours and so on etc. I'm not sure how best to confirm if it has the latest blocklist, perhaps a date in the np file? Or in the title?

I am aware the more complex Peer Gaurdian 2 does have an auto update function, i beleive it currently checks for updates every 24 hours, perhaps the code for this could be lifted, modded and added to PG Lite?

Source for both can be found here:

http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/      - for PG2

http://phoenixlabs.org/pglite/   - for Lite


Im not sure how easy this would be to do, as my understanding of such things is extremely limited.

Any help recieved would well appreiciated


Many many thanks

Nobby

[brotherS]

That would only be possible by hacking the program, which would not be a Coding Snack anymore. (And probably illegal too.)

But why do you want that at all? Paranoid?

Also, please keep in mind that you don't pay for their bandwith (it's a free program). Checking every 2 hours instead of every 24 hours might bring their server down.

[app103]

Peer Guardian and PeerGuardian Lyte are both open source C++ programs, (Visual Studio) in case you needed to know.

The mod Nobby wants is for a specific group of users of the program. A rather large group with at least 1 million users.

PGLyte currently doesn't contain any type of automatic updating features and this is needed. Not only is it needed, but it needs to check for updates more frequently than the regular PG program does, and to a different location than the full version does (as to not hammer the servers of the poor dudes that host that list).

Nobby's group plans on posting and maintaining their own list for use with the program and update it much more frequestly...several times a day if necessary.

Nobby has told me that if this request is filled, that he will include a link to this site on whatever page he posts a download link on, and urge users of the modified version to make donations in appreciation, as well as making a donation himself.

[brotherS]

The mod Nobby wants is for a specific group of users of the program. A rather large group with at least 1 million users.

PGLyte currently doesn't contain any type of automatic updating features and this is needed. Not only is it needed, but it needs to check for updates more frequently than the regular PG program does, and to a different location than the full version does (as to not hammer the servers of the poor dudes that host that list).

Yes, but then that modded PGLite would have to allow ONLY that other list to be updated more frequently. And - as history told me - that limit won't be there for long as soon as modding has been started...

Regarding "this is needed": millions of people think beer should be free for everyone, but that won't (and shouldn't) happen either

P.S.: Now please all say together: Lite! (as in http://phoenixlabs.org/pglite/ )

[Nobby]

Hey guys, any coders fancy taking a shot at this project????

[skrommel]

It appears that the guarding.p2p list is external to PGLite, so what is needed is to download the latest version and restart PGLite? Where do you download from?

I think my DownloadAndRun combined with Windows' scheduler should do the trick.

Skrommel

[Nobby]

Hi Skrommel

Thanks for replying, i would host the updated blocklists on up to 3 different sites to ensure we have some redundancy. Could these be customisable or would i have to use a single fixed URL?

Also, would it possible to use your plan to update the hosts file?

Thanks

Nobby

[skrommel]

Sorry for the late reply. So far DownloadAndRun only supports one file, and it's only made to run the downloaded file. But it could easily be extended. Care to elaborate?

Skrommel

[gottadoit]

How about using a DNS name that is round robin to the 3 different "physical sites/server" and have each server at each of the 3 sites respond to that virtualhost name. That way the client side software doesn't really need to care and you do have redundancy of sorts and the load would (in theory) be spread between the sites

You could do that and also give DownloadAndRun 4 url's to fetch the file from, the first being the shared name (to get load sharing between the servers) and then the 3 individual names to go direct to each server to cater for one of them being down or unavailable

I would imagine that the desired extension to DownloadAndRun would simply be to be able to specify a list of url's, where the secondary url's would be used in succession if the connection failed or a non-2xx/3xx response was received from the webserver

Given this application it would probably be quite useful to send information about the existing file with the GET request (Last-Modified and ETag headers) so that the remote server could reply with Not Modified headers if the file hasn't changed since the user last checked as that would potentially save a lot of bandwidth for the people hosting the files (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.3.5)

Another potentially useful thing to indicate in the GET request is to send the header 'Accept-Encoding' with either gzip or deflate or both and accept a compressed stream in response, also to cut down on bandwidth usage. This only matters if the remote file hasn't already been compressed before being loaded on the server (and that would make more sense of course because the servers wouldn't need to do on the fly compression before sending it to the client)

Those suggestions might get the ball rolling....