[tahoe-dev] Using Pagekite with Tahoe-LAFS

[Andrew Miller]

> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 7:20 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
> Very cool; thanks for posting the details.

>>> I already run a pagekite frontend on a cheap $5/month VPS that has a
>>> generous bandwidth limit; however I prefer not to rely on its
>>> security. [4]

> I think I understand what you mean, but if you had 20G storage on it and
> ran a tahoe node you wouldn't be relying on it for
> confidentiality/integrity.  You would be semi-relying on it for
> availability, both long-term and short-term.  But, with the proxy and a
> friend's-house-server you believe will stay available over the long
> term, even if your vps flakes you can set up another proxy.  Is that
> what you meant, or something else?

Yes, that's right. I'm happy to run both a frontend AND a Tahoe
storage node directly on the cheap VPS, without relying on the honesty
of the VPS for either function. The Tahoe storage node is safe to run
by Tahoe's design. The frontend is safe to run by my earlier argument
- it's transmitting only encrypted traffic.

The cost advantage, like you mentioned, is that the cheap VPS offers
much more bandwidth (1TB), but not much storage (20GB) and its
availability is questionable. Since it's cheap, I can reduce the risk
by having several of them.

You could do all of this just by setting up port forwarding or a
reverse proxy; there are several solutions to this besides Pagekite
and I'm confident that many Tahoe users already have alternate routes
to their nodes as a failsafe. Pagekite is (in my opinion) the most
appealing tool for this.


-- 
Andrew Miller