[tahoe-dev] Tahoe-LAFS is widely misunderstood

[Jody Harris]

You folks might want to eves drop on the conversations taking place in
VolunteerGrid2. You might learn something about how your software is
actually being deployed in the wild.
----
- Think carefully.


On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 12:10 PM, Brian Warner <warner at lothar.com> wrote:

> On 2/1/11 5:36 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:
> >
> > After looking at your Octavio page, I think your simplifications
> > relative to tahoe can be divided into several groups
> >
> >   no erasure coding; just replication. This gives up some performance,
> >   but seems like a reasonable tradeoff for many.
>
> Note that it also gives up reliability: according to my math, 5-of-10 is
> much much better than 1-of-2 when the servers are good (say >90%
> availability). (on the other hand, 1-of-2 is much better when the
> servers are bad). But yeah, it makes repair trivial, and is easier to
> explain to users.
>
> >   Removal of CLI and WUI, and using only FUSE. This is the aspeect I'm
> >   most in favor of.
>
> My problem with FUSE as the primary entry point is that it loses the
> whole least-authority model. The POSIX filesystem APIs don't expose
> things like retrieving a dircap for the subdirectory that you want to
> share with a friend, so the easiest thing to do is to share your whole
> rootcap with somebody, the equivalent of sharing passwords from the
> bad-old-days. It also doesn't let you write programs that are restricted
> to interacting with just a subset of your filesystem, so all the usual
> Confused Deputy vulnerabilities are still around.
>
> >   Removal of introducer; presumably each client has to be configured
> >   with all servers; I'm not sure this is a win.
>
> Yeah, I think we need something easier than manual configuration
> (especially if you want to maintain proper security between the nodes,
> which means you need to copy some cryptographic material from one box to
> another). I'm not convinced that Tahoe's Introducer is the best approach
> either, particularly with respect to grid-membership management: I'm
> looking forward to experimenting with Invitations and similar
> create-or-join-a-grid approaches.
>
> cheers,
>  -Brian
> _______________________________________________
> tahoe-dev mailing list
> tahoe-dev at tahoe-lafs.org
> http://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/attachments/20110202/5913889b/attachment.html>