[tahoe-dev] best practice for wanting to setup multiple tahoe instances on a single node

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 1:34 AM, Jimmy Tang <jcftang at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yeah, unfortunately, there's no good way to re-encode a file short of just downloading it and re-uploading it. The k-of-N settings for new uploads are controlled by the client node's tahoe.cfg file (see shares.required and shares.total), but they're embedded in the filecap. So you could set your tahoe.cfg to the new settings, use 'tahoe cp -r' to copy a bunch of files out of tahoe into your local directory, then 'tahoe cp -r' again to re-upload them (with the new settings).
>
> is this in the FAQ in the documentation? I think this type of information should probably reside somewhere on the website.
>
>> BTW, we use "re-encode" to talk about changing a file's encoding parameters, like 'k' and 'N': that generally means making entirely new shares. When we say "rebalance", we're talking about moving shares around without changing them, like when new servers are added, and we want to move shares around to spread out the load more evenly. We don't have automatic tools for either yet.
>
> I think I knew this already but I needed confirmation on it, perhaps if this isn't in the FAQ or docs already it might be nice to have it somewhere as well.

Here's The FAQ: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/FAQ which
is currently linked to from the front page of the wiki. The FAQ is a
wiki and you are encouraged to update it. Please help to maintain a
good FAQ that is up-to-date and is written in a way that is sensible
to newcomers (e.g. try to minimize the use of jargon terms which
people who are just investigating Tahoe-LAFS for the first time
haven't yet learned).

I agree that the above information should be included in the FAQ if it
is not already.

By the way, when allmydata.com had a Sun Thumper with, if I recall
correctly, 36 drives in it, we ran 36 storage server processes on it
and gave each one its own drive. (Or maybe 35 of them, with one drive
reserved for the root filesystem—I forget.) I don't know why that sort
of layout wouldn't work for your use case.

Regards,

Zooko