Dev:PeerType

Peer Types

A peer can have different types which characterizes the operation capabilities within a YaCy Peer-to-Peer network

virgin

A virgin peer has never reached another peer and got never a peer ping from another peer. Therefore a virgin peer is not connected to another peer and is also not visible to other peers. This can be a status by purpose or a network failure, according to the wanted network configuration.

junior

A junior peer successfully contacted another peer in the network, but other peers are not able to contact that junior peer. This may be caused (mostly) by a missing 'server port' configuration on the router that is in front of the computer that runs the junior peer. The junior status is discovered during the peer-ping process when the ping'ed peer tries to back-ping the ping-ing peer without success. Then the ping'ed peer assignes the ping-ing peer the junior status.

mentee

A mentee peer is a junior peer which has found a mentor peer that forwards server requests as reverse proxy to the mentee. This solves the problem that most users don't know how to configure their router to get a server port.

senior

A senior peer is able to receive and respond to requests from other peers. A senior peer therefore is running a public http server and is able to support other junior peers to become mentees which would transform the senior into a mentor.

mentor

A mentor peer is a senior peer which works as reverse proxy for junior peers, thus turing a junior into a mentee and itself into a mentor peer. The reverse proxy functionality is performed using the 'Host' attribute within the http header using a HexHash of the mentee peer as a host name together with the virtual TLD 'yacyh'.

principal

A principal peer is a senior peer which publishes the seedlist of all peers to a public location which can be retrieved by http. A list of such seedlist locations is attached to YaCy releases to enable a decentralized bootstraping of the network.