Get traffic use from users?

[Rudde]

Hello, I'm drifting a yearly DC++ hub, and I want to do some improvements to next year to get more/old people interested in it. One of the things I think would be cool is to graph traffic (data sent/received) using the hub to connect is there any way to do this?

[klondike]

You mean how much traffic the users expend with others? No, you can't, that's why it is P2P. If you mean the traffic from your hub to the users (or vicevers) this can be done, though usually global statistics make more sense.

[Rudde]

I was thinking between users, like: I send a request to a user and he report how much data he have uploaded / Downloaded from the server, or since start-up of his client , or the current transfer speeds between him and other users on my hub, why wasn't this implemented in ADC?

[klondike]

I was thinking between users, like: I send a request to a user and he report how much data he have uploaded / Downloaded from the server, or since start-up of his client , or the current transfer speeds between him and other users on my hub, why wasn't this implemented in ADC?

Because users can fake this information and because it really doesn't make much sense to get such a thing on a P2P protocol.

[Rudde]

Well, they report it in torrent, and it would be relevant for logging for server traffic.

If I log every IP of every user, and every client in my hub is in the same LAN, could I sniff how much traffic we have on DC and ADC protocol? Note: I do not have access to switches or core.

[klondike]

No they don't, in Torrents clients take notes of which users they do get faster / slower links and the protocol balances itself. The best you can get on the tracker is the number of unique client identifiers that requested a file, and that is because on bittorrent the torrents (and thus shares) are centralized on the tracker.

And no, with no access to the switch you won't be able to log the traffic usage by each client. And even in that case they could cheat you by using SSL tunnels and renegotiating a second connection outside of the hub.

[Rudde]

I don't really care if they "cheat" me, and they have no reason to do so. And if they try to VPN connect to the hub they won't get in anyway.

[Ayo]

Note that, while it is indeed possible to modify clients so that they report their upload/download stats to the hub, I have strong doubts that this is going to work out.

First, if such a feature would exist and all users would be honest, hubs admins will have a very strong incentive to use that data in order to somehow compensate users who share a lot or penalize those who don't. That, in turn, will create a very strong incentive for users to cheat that data. To the point that I highly doubt that information will be in any way accurate.

That's not to say that such stats are bad. I mean, they're fun and potentially useful. But with the incentives aligned as they are, it's unlikely that such a feature is going to give you what you want.

[Rudde]

Ahh, okey

This is not to block leeching users or anything, more to give my users a general idea of how much data that is transferred.



We do estimate that we deliver AT LEAST 85% of the "unknown" field.

[klondike]

You can modify the detection module to detect DC traffic the SUP sent with ADC and $GET sent with NMDC are very characteristic.

You can even let the hub contribute in detecting said connections (specially when encrypted) by providing the user's IP and ports to the analysis module but... no admin would be evil to do so, or yes?