[tahoe-dev] blocks instead of files?

[Chris Palmer]

Jody Harris writes:

> > The argument is straightforward. If you need k out of N shares to
> > reconstruct a segment, but you need all segments in order to reconstruct
> > a whole file, and the segment shares are stored on *different* subsets
> > of k servers, then you will end up needing more than k servers to
> > reconstruct the file.
> >
> This argument seems to "cut both ways."
> 
> I tend to agree with Chris Palmer, but I'm not convinced that I'm right in
> doing do so.

Well, it's apples and oranges. Octavia does not do erasure coding, it simply
does dumb copying. To the extent that its servers will let it (e.g. disk
usage quotas, throughput quotas, et c. as determined by server policy), an
Octavia client will copy the entirety of its files to as many servers as it
can/wants to/its user configured it to. The result might be that an Octavia
client gets all its file segments (I call them "blocks") from a single
server until that server dies, and then the client moves on to the next
server, and so on. Whatever works.