Celestia Forums

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone was using LoCI's LoDN (http://promise.sinrg.cs.utk.edu/lodn/) or exNodes to distribute textures? We created accounts for a couple of Celestia users and we are wondering how it has worked out.

Thanks,

Scott

Hmmm, it seems that I was not logged in when I posted the above.

Scott

Am I still not logged in? How do I convince this thing that I am logged in?

Scott

edit: Finally

Oh Hello Scott,

I think you were the same person I was briefly in contact with. Is your name Scott Aitchley? (Sorry i don't remember how to spell it and I can't find the email.)
I tried using the eXnodes, but I had some difficulties. First the Mac OS X client was not very stable. Even before trying to upload something the buttons were very flaky and it took minutes to change tabs. I never succeeded in getting anything on to the system.

On the whole, the process seemed like it might be more trouble than it was worth, since the files on the eXnodes are not permanent and would have to be "refreshed" to ensure that they were available. This would be okay for one-time transfers (e.g. lab data) but we would prefer that these things not require any effort to maintain.

Sorry to sound so negative. The system looked really cool. I was mostly distracted by other things. Anyway, if you are willing to assist me, we have some large files (>1GB) which we could try to sling around and you could observe our behavior. Let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Joe Bolte

Scott,

I just got a LoDN account and I'm trying to upload a file using the Java upload client. Unfortunately, although it seems to have created an exNode immediately, the file itself doesn't seem to be uploading. The Transfer Progress window just shows a "busy block" that oscillates back and forth. No values are shown in any of the transfer or throughput fields.

I'm using a PC running Windows XP Professional sp1, Firefox v0.9.2 and Java 2re1.4.2_03

Am I overlooking something?

alphap1us wrote:Oh Hello Scott,

I think you were the same person I was briefly in contact with. Is your name Scott Aitchley? (Sorry i don't remember how to spell it and I can't find the email.)

Yes, I am the same person. Your spelling was very close.

alphap1us wrote:I tried using the eXnodes, but I had some difficulties. First the Mac OS X client was not very stable. Even before trying to upload something the buttons were very flaky and it took minutes to change tabs. I never succeeded in getting anything on to the system.

I understand your frustration. The application is a Tcl/Tk wrapper that calls the underlying command line tools. I have not seen it take minutes to change tabs but it is clearly not as fast as native GUIs.

alphap1us wrote:On the whole, the process seemed like it might be more trouble than it was worth, since the files on the eXnodes are not permanent and would have to be "refreshed" to ensure that they were available. This would be okay for one-time transfers (e.g. lab data) but we would prefer that these things not require any effort to maintain.

Refreshing can be handled by LoDN. LoDN is a main Linux ISO download site. We host about eight Linux distributions. LoDN automates the refreshing and migrates the data to other IBP depots if some depots become unavailable. When you publish an exNode, LoDN provides two ways to download it. You can retrieve the exNode and use the LoRS Command app (or the command line tools directly) or you can use the LoDN Java Client (for those who do not want to install the LoRS tools). You can copy the hyperlinks and paste them in your web page and the user's would never have to visit the LoDN site. See http://loci.cs.utk.edu/modules.php?name ... age&pid=41 for an example of publishing data that is actually stored in LoDN.

alphap1us wrote:Sorry to sound so negative. The system looked really cool. I was mostly distracted by other things. Anyway, if you are willing to assist me, we have some large files (>1GB) which we could try to sling around and you could observe our behavior. Let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Joe Bolte

Are you comfortable with the Terminal? If so, I can give you some parameters to try and see how it goes.

Scott