Been looking for a distributed filesystem with no luck, any ideas? Distributed meaning that there is no single central access point. So the concept of mounting might mean amongst the roving set able to service it, or some underlying graph of it, something like: mount -t dht dht://<seed_node> /dist1 Users add their free block devices to the global backing store which was initialized with certain ZFS-like integrity and redundancy guarantees. Files would never vanish unless there are no longer enough blocks in the backing store to meet the init time guarantees. Users could either copy their hierarchies into the space, or attach them into the space for continued local maintenance. The one time init setting of a space could include whether pki recognized root users could maintain the overall hierarchy. Uid's might be an insertion node id. There may need to be voting authority on file/tree expiry if under space pressure, perhaps bitcoin-like, with the metrics established at init time. Users could add their block devices to whatever pool had the metrics they like. Anononymity and crypto would provide incentive to donate resources since unlike say bittorrent, no legal fear means no hit and run required. I don't really know what it might look like. Just that it needs sha2/3 integrity, redundancy, and file lifetime guarantees. It needs to be global, anonymous, and be a usable file system. And somehow deal with abusive fill such as dd if=/dev/zero of=zero, which implies some kind of moderated hierarchies appointed by the initializing entity. AFS is nice that users can bolt their filespace into the tree, and it has filesystem semantics. ZFS/BTRFS is nice due to their sha256 integrity, raidz redundancy and simple backing block device ideas. FreeNet/GnuNet/BitTorrent and all other 'filesharing' protocols are no good because there is no guarantee that files will not vanish. And they have no filesystem semantics, only push/fetch. RedHat GFS / DragonFly HAMMER are interesting as a distributed filesystem in which real work can be done on live files. Tahoe-LAFS is nice due to adding in block devices, but no good because of the central access point. Perhaps that could be distributed? Phantom/I2P/Tor could be used as the backend IP transport. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#Distributed_parallel_fault... The only thing that makes it worth while is that a lot of people have free space, want to give an get data, safely, and don't want to see their work in populating it wasted... so it can't go away. _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE