[tahoe-dev] A question about the system

[Pandelis Theodosiou]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 12:17 AM, Jiawei Jiang <jiawei at email.arizona.edu>wrote:

> Hi
>
> I am studying your system. First, it is a very nice system.
> I have confusion on the storage availability:
> "Users do rely on storage servers for *availability*. The cipher text is
> erasure-coded and distributed across *N* storage servers (the default
> value for *N* is 10) so that it can be recovered from any *K* of these
> servers (the default value of *K* is 3). Therefore only the simultaneous
> failure of *N-K+1* (with the defaults, 8) servers can make the data
> unavailable."
> I do not know how it works, how a file is encrypted and distributed among
> these server. Could anyone briefly explain it to me?
>

File is encrypted, then cut in small pieces and the pieces get distributed
to the N servers.
If any K servers are available, the file can be recontructed from the
pieces.
If less than K servers are available, it can't.

Not a 100% accuarte explanation but brief (and hopefully clear).

Pandelis



> Thanks very much.
>
> Jiawei Jiang
>
>
 <http://int.ask.com/web?siteid=10000861&webqsrc=999&l=dis&q=in%20>
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