Welcome to Cacheboy!
What is this all about?
The Cacheboy CDN project aims to provide a open, community built and supported platform for efficient content delivery.
Why?
At the moment, open source projects tend to host on mirror infrastructure which is donated by various service providers and institutions across the world.
These mirror sites are generally very well connected to the internet, but do not provide adequate information and control to the projects they are mirroring. These projects simply redirect users to a mirror based on "geographic" locality (or, in some cases, just random selection!) rather than leveraging current generation content delivery technology to provide the most optimal location for a user to access content.
In the short term, the Cacheboy project wishes to work with mirrors, content providers and internet access/service providers to provide the best delivery services to their clients. In the longer term, the project will provide a development platform for open source projects wishing to experiment with content delivery on an established, world-wide network.
The hope is to try and pull together application and network clue, along with cooperation from service providers and larger institutions who have an established open source content delivery/mirroring service.
How?
The content delivery network uses a variety of current techniques to select and redirect users to the "best" server for that content. This includes, but will not be limited to, geographic locality, current network topology (BGP information), feedback from ISPs about the most "optimal" routes, current link congestion and general performance.
The project leverages open source software and will be publishing information on the design, implementation and status of the network.
In time, the software and documentation will be provided, free of charge, to those who wish to study and improve it. It will most likely be provided under the GPLv3 licence.
How can I participate?
Hardware, colocation and bandwidth is being donated by various providers to provide these services during the initial trial phase.
In short, this project requires more mirror nodes to serve out more content. Please contact Adrian Chadd if you are interested in providing mirror nodes. Since content is servable via ASN and GeoIP region, mirror nodes in any country are welcome - but by far, the bulk of traffic is destined for the USA, Canada, Germany, UK and France. Mirror nodes in those countries would be especially welcome.
If you run an open source project and you're interested in using the Cacheboy services in any way, please contact Adrian Chadd.
Donating
Any donations made to the Cacheboy project (unfortunately not tax exempt at the moment) will be used to provide development and resources for open source projects. Xenion Pty Ltd / Xenion Communications (Australia) are currently funding Adrian's time to work on the Cacheboy project and it has offered to handle Paypal donations.