Are you local?

tsnlocal is one of the latest developments that the teck.tsnX development team, made of Neo and [wizard], have been working on. Dubbed in the early stages as the tsn.lcl project, tsnlocal is designed to get all the members of the site who participate into one seemingly local area network.

This is accomplished through the technologies that the folks over at hamachi.cc have been working on for over a year now. The hamachi client provides a secure vpn connection to all the computers attached to a particular virtual private network. In our case, it's one of several "tsnlocal" network name variations.

But that's only half of it. The other half is the file searching ability that tsnlocal provides. Using a distributed indexing process, 3 computers (the [[Oracle]] named set) crawl over the windows file shares on the network using Google Desktop, and index the files. Then, using the Google Desktop search abilities, the user can search the files shared. If they're connected to the tsnlocal hamachi network, then they will be able to download the file directly from the link on the search page. If they are not part of the tsnlocal network, or not logged on, they will only be able to search - not download.

The web interface is brought to you by the creators of "WAMP: PHP5, Apache, and MySQL for Windows". WAMP is a nearly zero-config installation of Apache, PHP5 and MySQL such that they are pre-configured to run with each other, and provide a centralized command console for controlling the config files and services running. This server setup will be the basis for keeping track of the online status of the members of the tsnlocal network. Right now, the page is coded simply in html - but in time, it will be ported to AJAX and be auto-refreshing, with centralized data storage and input pages.

There is a lot more technology under the hood of tsnlocal, and some of it is having to be built from scratch...some of the configuration is experimental, in order to get things working. But the features mentioned above are the basis for the service.