On Wed, 2 Mar 2011, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

just some random comments along similar lines:

* like UUCP, SMTP was also designed to be resilient in the face of significant disconnects and down-time. many people forget this due to its abuse for spam... :) (no, you do not have to use SMTP _just_ for transferring mail, as we well know. i say this explicitly to avoid any assumptions that i have said "yes! use SMTP! And Only For Email!")

* nmbd (part of samba) - actually RFC1001 and RFC1002 - has the problem of disappearing unreliable hosts solved for... decades. it's just not very well understood or appreciated that that's nmbd does. doing peer-to-peer multi-LAN host detection and communicating host availability network-wide is f*****g hard to get right. back in 1997-9 at the CIFS conferences, we found that EVERY single implementor of RFC1001/1002 takes about THREEEE years to get the implementation correct. INCLUDING microsoft themselves! apt-cache show samba

*avahi is a piece of shit by comparison to what nmbd can do: it's just that everyone, when they hear the words "microsoft" and "network neighbourhood", turns their back on nmbd, pulls their trousers down and strains mightily to heave out a steaming turd in its general direction, rather than recognise the value of what nmbd has provided. think about this: DESPITE completely ignorant computer users completely screwing up their network configurations, systems based around the "network neighbourhood" _still_ work... :)

* n2n is a peer-to-peer Layer 2 VPN (similar to openvpn). its only flaw is that it requires all parties to agree a "key", and no mechanism has been provided to "negotiate" such a key. apt-cache show n2n

* babel is a mathematically-provably-correct routing algorithm that can be used to replace BGP. every system participates in the routing, and there is no dependence on any one given system. apt-cache show babeld

also... hah! it looks like there is something on top of babeld, called ahcpd - wooow. i hadn't heard of that one, before, until today.

so - just food for thought: the pieces of the puzzle, to provide resilient large-scale networking and communications infrastructure, even in the face of absolutely zero "central servers", are beginning to appear.

and the nice thing is - these are all debian packages.

the only thing i _haven't_ been able to find is a peer-to-peer DNS service, but i beliieeeeve that there is someone working on that. ok. they were _supposed_ to be: http://groups.google.com/group/dns-p2p - ahh, actually someone's made an effort: https://github.com/Mononofu/P2P-DNS

so. there exists solid, real-world debian packages for the basics behind the networking. as debian packages. that's really good.

l.

I have glanced at the documentation of the remarkable work of Zooko O'Whielacronx and the Tahoe team: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs And ZRTP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP may help us to produce a system of encrypted file-transfer/email/general-over-the-Net-communication which meets my standard constraint: Two people who have Net connected computers behind NAT/fire/proxy walls can spend ten minutes on the phone and set up the link; only one of the two need have heard of the link software before the telephone call. oo--JS. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- 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