USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps 246
jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).
SoC - exist today (Score:1, Interesting)
Already have this... (Score:1, Interesting)
I already have Torrent functionality in my Asus W500L router with support for storing the files onto any attached USB drive.
Why the need for this device when you'll need your router on anyway?
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why I bought an eee. Run quite awhile when the monitor is turned off :P
With a 26GB cap on my down pipe a month, it really saves me that I can stash this thing at the library and pull all my low priority large files.
With external power it'd just be a bittorrent NAS. (Score:4, Interesting)
This gives new meaning to the term (Score:4, Interesting)
Zombie computers.
Re:KillerNIC? (Score:3, Interesting)
This one works while your computer is in a sleep state. The KillerNIC does not. Sure, it could in theory, but the software to do so doesn't come with it, and no third party ever developed such an app.
So while hardware offloading network activity is nothign new, software to run downloads while the computer is asleep is quite new, and quite nice.
At a reasonable price, I'd consider getting one myself, just to save on power costs.
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Interesting)
Torrents should be the router's job (Score:5, Interesting)
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
Before you post links to routers with a USB port and a shoddy torrent client: I know about these, and it's a step in the right direction, but the interface needs to be much better. I should click on a torrent file on my bedroom computer and have that torrent be loaded into my router.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
Re:There's another name for such a device (Score:3, Interesting)
Dell did it one step better and put the ARM chip in the laptop along side the x86 CPU. I forget what version of laptop does this but it's currently used for instant-On but has full network access and I guess it shares it with Windows since they said Windows can boot while using the ARM stuff.
But as someone else stated, why not just put DD-WRT oh your router and let the torrents work from there.
LoB
Re:KillerNIC? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
PeerGuardian is a trap. Consider.
Loads of people are torrenting at any one time. Probably the vast majority of them will torrent a few files and then stop. A small minority will torrent 24/7 maxing out their pipes.
Now if you want to shut down filesharing it is this small minority that you want to target, firstly because they are a legally inviting target - it's hard for them to claim they are innocent if you can show they were maxing out their DSL connection 24/7. Also from a PR point of view it's better to sue the hard core pirates than the casual ones - you avoid headlines about grandmothers being sued for thousands of dollars because their grandkids downloaded a couple of songs. Last but not least they are the ones seeding most of the files because the casual torrenters download what they want and then shutdown the application.
Normally of course there's no good way looking at one torrent to work out which torrenters are the hard core minority and which are casual torrenters.
Enter PeerGuardian.
The hard core torrenters will download and install it and the casual ones won't bother. Now you have an easy way to distinguish the two. Try to connect from a few IP addresses on the blocklist, and try to connect from a few that aren't. The last point is important - anti piracy organisations have lots of employees and could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections. I.e. it's quite easy for them to get hold of IP addresses which are not in their organisational IP block. So long as they don't attack torrents from those IP addresses there is no reason for those addresses to be blacklisted.
So PeerGuardian provides no protection for downloaders and it provides very useful information to anti piracy organisations.
If you don't want to get sued, don't seed and don't install things like PeerGuardian.
Re:Torrents should be the router's job (Score:4, Interesting)
This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.
I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.
This makes me wonder if this is already possible with a little hardware hacking and something like openwrt. The only piece currently missing is the "I'm going to bed" packet from the client to the router, and the "go back to sleep packet" you mentioned. When a client goes to sleep, the router takes over the connections using whatever the mechanism is in this paper, and starts caching rx packets.
Then either when the buffer gets full or a certain pre-defined packet signature triggers the router, the router can send a replay of what happened at 100Mbps back to the client, which is all transparent to the OS.
The caveat of course being that the network stack would need to be similar, you can't have the client machine thinking it sent a RST where the router didn't. And the router would need to decide which packets it can handle, and which are unimportant, and which need to cause a wakeup. But on the surface there isn't a lot stopping a POC of this kind of thing.
Neat concept (Score:3, Interesting)
something similar (Score:4, Interesting)
My housemate has something similar. It's the typical NAS with two drives, but the cool part is the web interface. You can c&p torrent urls straight into it and even manage all your existing torrents through the web interface. So every computer in the house has a central torrent location. When it's time to play L4D we don't have to go around checking which machine is sucking all the band, we just log into the NAS and pause the torrents.
Just went and looked at it. It's a D-link DNS 323 (company link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509 [dlink.com]).
I'd say the d-link beats the Microsoft research team's device (even though gumstix is awesome). No pc required and it can sit anywhere on your network.
Re:Torrents should be the router's job (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people run rtorrent on their WL-500g's and use an rtorrent front end on the PC. It works perfectly well. rTorrent continuosly downloads on the router and the front end transparantly displays information as if it was downloading locally. No moving of the service to have it running on the PC or embedded device is required.
Really this board in the article has no advantages over a bittorrent capable router that i can see. It only allows 1 computer to make use of the services on the embedded device, so you'd need 1 for each computer. It takes up 2 USB ports when really it already has connectivity to the computer via the LAN anyway so why the need for USB at all? It still requires the modem/router to be on to work, so it uses more power than just a bittorrent router. It doesn't work when the computer is in hibernate or off completely, only when in S3 or above. It doesn't have any other storage options but the SD-Card...
I could go on but you get the idea.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections
Are those employees all licensed private investigators [slashdot.org]?
Re:Perfect for the computer lab (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I went to school, they had an excellent means of blocking p2p traffic. After the RIAA started suing schools, they made it a priority to make sure no one could connect to a bit torrent network from their internet accounts.
They also had the PCs locked down to the point where it was nearly impossible to change a setting (with impossible being the goal), and had a ghost scheduler set up to reformat and re-image the drives at 3am.
That doesn't mean it can't be done. But, in some campuses, it would be more problem than it was worth, especially when the IT manager found the device.