[tahoe-dev] Dedicated LAFS nodes offer

[Avi Freedman]

Hi...

[I know this isn't a very tl;dr group but the summary is - we're
 doing beta of private LAFS clouds and if you want to give it 
 a shot I'll get you some coupon codes for free service over 
 the weekend or early next week]

So the meat of the post -

We wanted to let everyone in the community know that Havenco
is launching storage (and VPN services) in beta this month, and the
storage service is going to offer LAFS nodes (like rentanode.nl 
had been doing) as well as S3-compatible buckets.

When the topic of relaunching Havenco came up back in January 
(which seems like a looong time ago - before mega launched and 
Aaron's trafic death), we were thinking that a smart client that 
could do per file or directory access controls and keys would be 
really great - not knowing about LAFS at the time.

Zooko and the LA team, and the tahoe-dev community as a whole, have
been great as we've investigated the capabilities and roadmap of
LAFS and the ways to best run it in a provider setting, and we're 
going to try to return the favor by doing some additional FAQs 
and instructions which we'll contribute to the project as well 
as presenting at www.havenco.com.

The architecture we're running for LAFS to do accounting is one
that the LA team helped us validate - we're doing one Linux uid
per customer and running 10 tahoe procs each in a separate directory
across separate machines, and running RAID underneath so that we
can ignore the potential performance issues with client-side 
resync right now.

If there's a lot of interest the plan is to develop or fund 
development towards progress on the accounting-related tickets;
we'd prefer to work in a mode where all the ciphertext from
all the customers are interspersed.  Just hard to see doing
that now with no way to track usage.

We've got the basics of node and introducer setup going but would
love to have some LAFS users do some testing with us next week.
I'll make sure that anyone who does it can have 50GB free of
private backend for a few years; if you're on this list as an
enthusiast, dev, or potential dev we'd just like to support the
community so that LAFS can fulfill Zooko+team's vision of 
empowering user freedom [he puts it much better than I could
though].

Also...  We've had some conversations both with the LA team and
with Guido recently (of rentanode) who has been generous with
his time and has shared some thoughts about how he was running
LAFS as a service provider.

I kept some of that off the list because I was asking questions
that were in some cases validating assumptions based on reading
the docs and in some cases were asked without having time to
read the history of all relevant TRAC tickets, but we'll try
to put together a LAFS for service provider FAQ based on some
of those discussions, and keep future silly questions and 
roadmap conversations on the tahoe-dev list.

If we get some new-user usage of LAFS, we'll also try to 
summarize the questions we get about LAFS use and user/usability 
feedback to the list every so often.

In our limited testing the first thing that sysadminnish
people have asked for is the ability to have something like
ssh key passphrases for caps.  

Thanks again to the LAFS team and the community...

[Again as a summary - if you're interested in helping us test
 or just adding some free nodes to your play, test, dev, or
 prod pool for a few years, please send me an off-list note
 and we'll get you info in the next week]

Thanks,

Avi (working with the havenco tech team)