| 摘要 |
A network appliance (18) is capable of remote booting and obtaining its configuration information from a source (28, 30) located far away. The network appliance (18) can be shipped to a business location or office environment without requiring a local boot server in that location or environment and without requiring the presence of a person who is familiar with and highly skilled in configuring the appliance. The invention allows for booting and the obtaining of configuration information (36), and therefore allows for the functioning of the appliance (18), regardless of whether there is a local server in the local network environment, such as a DHCP server or a boot server, that has been set up and configured to provide to the appliance (18) the booting and configuration information (36) it requires. Self-organizing distributed appliance (SODAs) according to the invention augment the Internet (10) by providing a self-organizing network that efficiently distributed big data items, i.e., data items that cannot be downloaded timely (on demand) over today's networks. One application of self-organizing distributed appliances is the distribution of high-quality video (a half-hour MPEG-1 movies in about one Gbyte). The SODA network alleviates network bottlenecks.
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