Building a better WASTE

I really liked WASTE. It was a great idea.

I think its sad that we currently have no good way to manage large amounts of content and distribute that content amongst a bunch of computers in a local network.

WASTE tried to do this; but it was quite crappy.

Here's the features that its replacement should have:

• Remote computers are treated as such. Download a list of their files, but don't transfer the actual files over the 'net by default
• Local clients should be treated as such. Download any files and metadata the user wants. Use DNS-SD to detect this
• When operating across the 'tubes, it should use a proper identity system and WASTE network style encryption
• If a network connection is interrupted, do something sensible. Get whats left of the file from other clients, or just wait for the server to reconnect and download the rest then
• If two people have the same data, my computer should pick who to download it from automatically. This should work regardless of file renaming, etc.
• Manage upload and download queues for everything. Hard disks which are seeking all over the place have lower sustained throughput. Seek time becomes negligable with huge buffers.
• I own a few computers. I want to be able to manage everything from one machine. I want it to use my other machines' disk read/write capacity for downloading faster. At periods of low load, the data can be slowly migrated to the most sensible long-term location(s).
• Generate some damn stats. I like graphs. What is downloaded the most? What is shared the most?
• The system should be cross-platform: windows, linux (maybe just headless), macosx.
• Integrate like samba.

Language

Options are:

• Web-based
• .NET
• Ruby / Python

Web-based is easiest but will have the worst integration. .NET or Ruby will favour one of macosx or windows. Thats ok by me. Should pick one.