What is peer-to-peer networking?

Imagine a network within an office.  There are a number of work stations and in each we have local hard drives.  Then we have peripheral machines like printers.  In a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture each one of the computers can be allowed access to all the other computers (other work stations, printers, scanners, etc).  All hard disks and peripherals can be shareable between all the hosts.  You have realised that I use the term 'can be' quite often, so as to suggest that access rights have to be provided to the hosts.  For example printers could be password protected.  The way it works is that printer is mounted on one of the machines on the network and another machine is given access to the printer and the whole thing looks as though printer is local to it.  Good for situations when we have a small local network and we do not want to be messing with complicated server set-up.

In a network like this all machines are connected to all other machines in the network.  Each machine can act as both a client and a server.  Likewise, every time a search request is entered, it flows through all of the machines hooked into the network — often several thousand hosts/servers with more than a million files between them. With all those servers out there, you stand a good chance of finding most any file you want.

 

How does client-server differ from peer-to-peer? What are the ad/disadvantages?

 

 

P2P is not a new technology and it lost favour with the advent of client-server architecture.  However it is making a comeback with Internet applications and this is predominantly thanks to ventures like Napster.

 

What is kaza famous for? In simple terms, How does their architecture actually work?

 

 

P2P networking over the Internet also promises to lead the way toward new architectures for the Internet in the form of commercial sharing of computing resources.  This type of vision is close to the original philosophy of Internet and open source systems.  Another envisaged application of P2P is in search engines.  With P2P, instead of crawling web sites through a central database, web sites can crawl themselves  and for the participants to share information with each other and other users.

 

Internet applications using P2P are not altogether free of problems.  One drawback is that users must be willing to share their bandwidth with the participants and allow access to their computers.  This has confidence and trust implications as well as security and vulnerability to viruses and other baddies.

 

Integrity of information could also be a problem.  Imagine if the track Sabbath Bloody Sabbath from Black Sabbath's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album in MP3 is labelled solitaire by Andy Williams.