Introducing Passim
tl;dr: Passim is a local caching server that uses mDNS to advertise files by their SHA-256 hash. Named after the Latin word for “here, there and everywhere” it might save a lot of people a lot of money.
Much of the software running on your computer that connects to other systems over the Internet needs to periodically download metadata or other information needed to perform other requests.
As part of running the passim/LVFS projects I’ve seen how download this “small” file once per 24h turns into tens of millions of requests per day — which is about ~10TB of bandwidth! Everybody downloads the same file from a CDN, and although a CDN is not super-expensive, it’s certainly not free. Everybody on your local network (perhaps dozens of users in an office) has to download the same 1MB blob of metadata from a CDN over a perhaps-non-free shared internet link.
What if we could download the file from the Internet CDN on one machine, and the next machine on the local network that needs it instead downloads it from the first machine? We could put a limit on the number of times it can be shared, and the maximum age so that we don’t store yesterdays metadata forever, and so that we don’t turn a ThinkPad X220 into a machine distributing 1Gb/s to every other machine in the office. We could cut the CDN traffic by at least one order of magnitude, but possibly much more. This is better for the person paying the cloud bill, the person paying for the internet connection, and the planet as a whole.
This is what Passim might be. You add automatically or manually add files to the daemon which stores them in /var/lib/passim/data with xattrs set on each file for the max-age and share-limit. When the file has been shared more than the share limit number of times, or is older than the max age it is deleted and not advertised to other clients.