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Comment by jewel | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing about the screenshot is that it says "Local PCs", as in PCs on the LAN. This would be incredible and I wish everyone would do the same thing. Especially Steam. Imagine what a problem it is when you want to play a ten player game of TF2 at the office and nobody has it installed.

Getting updates from local PCs is something much easier to program than the general case of P2P traffic over the Internet. A simple UDP broadcast packet can find other peers, and wifi or the LAN will work great for transfer.

A long time ago we had to put an HTTP proxy in for debian updates so that when we updated all of our virtual machines it wouldn't saturate the T1.

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I agree, it is like when Microsoft made KMS activation servers for companies that had volume licenses and no Internet connection to Microsoft to activate systems. Only now it can download Windows 10 updates and then have each machine on the LAN connect to it to download updates.

Every time I reformat a Windows machine, I have to go through the downloading updates process to get it back to speed. It would be easier if I had all of the updates on a local machine I could connect to and download them.

Steam too, every reformat means the games have to be downloaded again unless you can back them up to a USB drive or something.

> I agree, it is like when Microsoft made KMS activation servers for companies that had volume licenses and no Internet connection to Microsoft to activate systems. Only now it can download Windows 10 updates and then have each machine on the LAN connect to it to download updates.

Microsoft has had WSUS for quite some time now, which lets you get all your office PCs downloading from one server. IIRC, you can even do offline updating of your WSUS server (download the updates elsewhere, transfer to WSUS via USB, install on all your clients via the network)

Steam has supported libraries on arbitrary drives for a long time now. I have 3 main drives: SSD for OS and programs, and 2 hybrid drives: 1 for user files and the other for a steam Library.

Imagine what a problem it is when you want to play a ten player game of TF2 at the office and nobody has it installed.

This is where you create a network drive and share it with everyone's Steam client as a Steam Library.

(Catch: you can't use iSCSI unless you use a cluster FS, and circa 2012 using a Samba share required some text file editing)

Actually, Steam is using P2P for content delivery, and have been for quite some time now. I'm not sure about the underlying technology, but the kids at the local data party get all ecstatic when they see download speeds of >100MB/s.

Bram Cohen, the guy behind the Bittorrent protocol, worked for Valve for a short time.

Is it possible to install Steam on a nas? that way games can be downloaded while the pc is off?

would ipfs.io be able to do that for all applications?

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