Fwd: Easy way for community to volunteer storage

[Sajith Sasidharan]

Hi Swami,

You are right, your email did not make it to the list.  I'm sorry about that.
Our list is a little broken right now.  We're working on fixing it.

Thank you for not giving up on us though!  One challenge we have is not
knowing enough about real world users or usage of Tahoe-LAFS, so I am very
glad that you persisted.

The usage pattern you've proposed sounds like sounds like a variation of what
is called a "friendnet" in Tahoe-LAFS parlance, where a group of friends share
storage with each other.  Tahoe-LAFS could be appropriate for you, although
not quite in its current shape, and not right now, just as you thought.

You have gathered some ideas from the linked Gridsync issue about difficulties
of running Tahoe-LAFS storage nodes in people's home machines.  I am still new
to Tahoe-LAFS, so I am not sure I have better ideas than that.  Hopefully more
experienced people in the list will chime in.

Regarding point 1, Tahoe-LAFS is not super simple to install or use at the
moment.  I suppose we should strive to improve that.  Regarding point 2, I'm
not quite sure what kind of challenges there are when running a storage server
node behind a home router -- I have not partaken in a friendnet myself.  About
all your points, I'd love to heed to the community's wisdom.

To answer your question about interest in the ideas, I do think they are
interesting.  It should be possible to create what you describe using Tahoe-
LAFS as a building block.  I am just unclear about the amount of effort.

In any case, I suppose we should stay in touch. :)

Regards,
Sajith.


On Sat, 2021-04-17 at 23:38 +0530, Swami Kevala wrote:
> Hi Sajith,
> 
> Not sure if my email to Tahoe lafs Dev list was getting through... So
> sending to you directly. Hope you don't mind.
> 
> Kind Regards
> Swami Kevala
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Swami Kevala <swami.kevala at ishafoundation.org>
> Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2021, 13:09
> Subject: Easy way for community to volunteer storage
> To: <tahoe-dev at tahoe-lafs.org>
> 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am looking for a way to use Tahoe-LAFS to enable a large community of non-
> technical people to volunteer a fraction of the hard drive space on their
> personal computers to collaboratively host an archive of digital content in
> perpetuity. (Sort of a cross between BitTorrent and the SETI at Home project -
> but for storage rather than processing)
> 
> We have an archive with about 1 PB of content, and we have a community of
> over a million active supporters. We are looking at cost-effective and
> resilient ways of hosting our archives on several redundant systems.
> Sharding, encrypting and distributing it to our community seems like one
> robust way of doing this.
> 
> Points to note:
> 
> 1. Software installation and configuration should be super-simple. One-click 
> install, which asks the user how much space he can volunteer, and which
> local directory will be used   
> 
> 2. Most people will not have a static IP address, so the solution should
> work for the average personal computer setup (dynamic IP assigned by ISP) -
> without needing any additional router configuration
> 
> 3. It is not a problem if many people have their computers switched off
> frequently (e.g. during non-work hours). The primary purpose is to provide a
> durable long term archive; speed of restoring content is a secondary
> factor. 
> 
> 4. The volunteers would not use the grid to share their own content. The
> system would be strictly one-way. Our central archives would be pushed onto
> the distributed storage provided by the community. The motivation for the
> community to participate is that they understand the archive holds content
> which is of great value to humanity.
> 
> 5. The amount of storage per node could vary between say 10GB on a home PC,
> to say 1TB on a server type system 
> 
> For your reference, I initially posted this question on the Gridsync Github
> page, and was directed to this mailing list by the developer
> 
> https://github.com/gridsync/gridsync/issues/341
> 
> I understand that currently this may not possible as I have described. Would
> like to know if there is any interest in the ideas being proposed, and any
> likelihood of this kind of arrangement being possible in the future.
> 
> Kind Regards
> Swami Kevala
>