[tahoe-dev] VolunteerGrid2 desperately needs a "safe gateway"

[Scott Dial]

On 2/7/2011 3:41 PM, Jody Harris wrote:
> I know that this has been brought up before, and I know that I've
> discussed it as well as posted a ticket on it before, but as a user of
> VolunteerGrid2, I'm asking again for a "safe web gateway."
> 
> At this point, we have two web-facing "gateways" (WUI interfaces), but
> we have been forced to wrap them behind proxies in order to keep our
> introducer furl secret. As it stands, there is no way that I can share a
> capability with anyone outside of the VolunteerGrid2 community. This
> severely limits the usefulness of Tahoe and our grid.

I would think restricting access to the "gateway" is also a measure of
restraining you from burdening the VolunteerGrid2 community with
downloads by unknown 3rd parties. If I was a member of VG2, then I would
be against any party enabling anonymous access to the grid. I see that
as akin to letting you upload files to my webserver and you handing out
URLs and you starting a warez site -- it's worse with the grid because
it would be difficult to account for who was responsible for the
resource consumption with an anonymous gateway.

However, your idea about a "safe web gateway" is something that I had a
desire for as well, for my own personal grid. In that case, I am only
consuming my own resources by making caps known to the internet at-large
-- no different than hosting files on a webserver. Toward that end, I
setup a proxy such that path "/" required authorization and "/uri" and
"/file" did not.

Unless I am mistaken, that gives anonymous access to directories and
files on my grid without giving access to create or upload files or to
servers.

-- 
Scott Dial
scott at scottdial.com
scodial at cs.indiana.edu

-- 
Scott Dial
scott at scottdial.com
scodial at cs.indiana.edu