

The Coral Content Distribution Network - hrjet
http://www.coralcdn.org/

======
jaggederest
Note that they don't cache anything over ~50mb, and it's a relatively small
cache (~4GB nodes, cleared LRU first), in addition to only revalidating every
5 minutes.

[http://wiki.coralcdn.org/faq.html](http://wiki.coralcdn.org/faq.html)

So don't use it for big files or anything that changes more than every 5
minutes.

~~~
consultant23522
It's particularly useful when an article or something you want to read gets
slashdotted.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Why don't forums like Hacker News, Reddit, etc. build this into their
submission process, so the article/page is cached upon submission, and readers
are directed straight to the cached copy?

~~~
X4
bump

------
delinka
And don't forget, if you're outside the US, appending their CDN domain to
yours brings your static content (and the browsing trails of your users)
silently into US jurisdiction. Or at least that's the DHS and FBI
interpretation of the law with respect to .com, .org, .net

~~~
skrebbel
Browsing trails, I see that.

But content? Anyone can make a .net domain and mirror non-US content on it.
Does that give DHS/FBI any legal power over said content? Not over the
original, at least.

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marcamillion
Isn't this very old? I am sure I stumbled upon this while doing some research
on a CDN project I was interested in about 5-years ago.

I would assume that CDN technology has progressed significantly since then.

The impression I got at the time, was that it wasn't maintained - as well as I
would have liked. I could be mistaken, but that was the impression I got a few
years ago.

~~~
hrjet
From their overview page:

"20 Aug 2012: We're still here! While active development has been stopped for
a while, we continue to operate CoralCDN as an open, free service. It's now
been running continuously for more than 8 years (since March 2004), and
continues to get a few million users per day at last check. Enjoy continuing
to use the service!"

------
StavrosK
I thought everyone knew about this? I use it for mirrors when a site looks
like it's going to go down. Just append .nyud.net to the domain and it gets
cached.

~~~
sspiff
Same here. CoralCDN has been around for ages, I've used it to auto-mirror
images and other static content from sites to reduce bandwidth consumption.
Works really well.

~~~
Maakuth
IIRC, it was originally devised to fix sites melting down under traffic spikes
generated by Slashdot browsing crowd.

~~~
sspiff
That's what I used it for! Of course, I never published anything worth getting
Slashdotted :)

------
_prometheus
CoralCDN is old an unmaintained.

For the new hotness (web only), try
[https://peercdn.com/](https://peercdn.com/) :)

~~~
sspiff
This requires Javascript though, and its operation is way more complicated. It
depends on peer-to-peer delivery, which is pretty hard when most users are
behind NAT'ed routers and proxies. Furthermore, you need quite a few
concurrent users requesting the same resources before it will even start using
this CDN.

Finally, it's "currently in private beta", which means it's relatively
untested in the real world, and not open like Coral at all.

I think there's just no comparing the two.

~~~
hollerith
Yes, but it's the new hotness :)

~~~
sspiff
Much like using Hadoop on 15MB CSV files? :)

~~~
debacle
15MB of Big Data.

------
sam152
Great project. For anyone interested in serving up static resources
seamlessly, you can use something like the following in an Apache config:

    
    
      <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
        RewriteEngine on
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^CoralWebPrx
        RewriteRule "\.(png|jpg|css|js)$" http://%{HTTP_HOST}.nyud.net%{REQUEST_URI} [L]
      </IfModule>
    

I wonder if this can be used in any interesting ways as a drop-in performance
enhancement. Using it as an automatic domain sharding solution might be
viable?

------
ibotty
it is unmaintained. to quote a mail from january 2012 (the maybe twentieth
latest mail in the -dev mailing list):

    
    
        > CoralCDN is basically a "one-person job", and I never got around to 
        > building a great monitoring-and-notification system. 
        > In this particular 
        > case, I didn't have as great access to email as I usually do.

------
draugadrotten
coralcdn.org is blocked by HR policies where I work; thus I would recommend
against using it for business purposes.

~~~
annnnd
I am quite sure the proper way to resolve this problem would be to change the
said policies.

~~~
singold
I think the thing is that you cant change policies on your users companies

~~~
derefr
But users can also have arbitrarily horrible policies that will restrict any
possible thing you might like to do. No images loaded, for example.

------
progx
Who pay all the servers? Or how can anybody contribute?

~~~
lrem
Everybody pays. It's operated using PlanetLab, which is run by over 500
universities from all around the world. You can't contribute to the operation,
other than maybe funding a PlanetLab node somewhere.

~~~
progx
Ok thx, i misunderstand PlanetLab, thought it was a company ;)

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achalkley
What the heck is that "Illuminati" thing at the bottom of the page mean?

~~~
__alexs
[http://web.archive.org/web/20100723133654/http://illuminati....](http://web.archive.org/web/20100723133654/http://illuminati.coralcdn.org/)

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xr09
And now I know about this? I should hit me in the face.

------
lnanek2
It hasn't been very fast or reliable the few times I tried it. I'd rather pay
for a decent offering.

------
AgLiAn
Time out.

~~~
mafro
Try appending .nyud.net to the URL.

