Patent ID: 6857012

Claim:
A method for initializing a new node in a network comprising: adding a new node to a network having a plurality of nodes, wherein the plurality of nodes is arranged in the form of a virtual tree and the new node is a node of the tree, each node of the tree having a set of attributes and a set of rolled up attributes for identification; sending a query automatically to the plurality of nodes to determine what contents to download, the content being stored as block files in one or more nodes of the network, the query comprising the set of attributes and the set of rolled up attributes for the new node; receiving replies to the query from a subset of the plurality of nodes having the contents for the new node, wherein each of the replies identifies what subset of the block files is available in a replying node and performance characteristics of the replying node; downloading desired portions of the contents from the subset of the block files from the replying nodes that are least congested.