[p2p-hackers] Distributed filesystem choices (aka: none yet?)

[grarpamp]

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-tolerant_file_systems


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.
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