[volunteergrid2-l] New Member

[Christoph Langguth]

Hi folks,

first off, thanks for having set up this project and for accepting me 
into it! :-)

So here's a bit about myself: I'm administering the server of a 
student's club in Jena, Germany (rosenkeller.org). We are essentially 
self-hosted -- we have our own physical Linux machine acting as WWW and 
mail server, and as a gateway for the internal machines. Thankfully, 
we're connected directly to the University network with Gigabit 
Ethernet, and all of that with no cost for us (University maintains the 
infrastructure) :-)

So that little server is essentially where almost all of the pretty 
important data is -- like our web presence, and "professional" and 
personal mails and files of our staff and members.

The main reason for applying here is backup provisioning. While we do 
make local backups through backuppc, we don't really have a working 
solution which would survive a catastrophic event (like the office 
burning down). Offsite backup is always a good idea, but we simply can't 
really afford commercial solutions. Well, we probably could if I 
insisted really hard that backups actually are important and worth the 
"insurance" fee, but hey:

- a "social" distributed storage where we get the benefits for free and 
can offer the same for other people is just more inline with my personal 
point of view
- it's easier if "management" is not involved in these things, so it's 
more hassle-free for me as well if I can provide a working solution 
without much "organizational" overhead (managing bills etc.)
- finally, it's simply fun to get into new technologies :-)

When I said we don't have a working solution, I actually cheated a bit: 
we do have a solution based on wuala ( http://wuala.com ). This worked 
pretty well until a few days ago, when they announced that their storage 
trading would not be supported anymore. If you're interested, here's the 
(mostly disappointed) feedback from affected users: 
https://forum.wuala.com/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2231 . I am one of the many 
users who think that that decision was made more because of strategic 
than technical reasons (LaCie bought wuala some time ago...), but that 
is speculation and convincing responses from the developers are scarce.

It is actually in that forum that I learned about Tahoe LAFS. I was 
intrigued, so I just installed it and tried it out with my own little 
"infrastructure". It looked promising, but obviously, a local 
infrastructure is not terribly useful if the goal is off-site storage. 
So this is how I ended up finding VG2 and thinking it's just the right 
thing to do, so here I am :-)

Now that you know where I'm trying to go, here's a little summary of how 
I intend to contribute:

- Server machine is up 24/7 (well, at least it should, unless Murphy's 
law strikes)
- Connectivity is Gigabit Ethernet, so both up- and downloads should 
normally work decently fast :-)

There are a few open questions left, most of which I'll probably bug you 
with in subsequent mails (like what is the best strategy for backing up 
etc). One thing probably needs to be sorted out first though, so here it 
goes straight away: The volume that we need to back up is not terribly 
high, at the moment it's around 60 GB for a full backup, and I expect it 
to grow only slowly.

At the moment, we only have one internal disk (500 GB), of which some 
250GB are free. Of course, even for local backups a second disk is 
required, and the same would go for the storage provided to tahoe. 
Therefore, we intend to buy an additional disk for that purpose. If I'm 
not mistaken, you have a requirement of 1TB or more -- is that still 
up-to-date? From my point of view, the most sensible thing would be to 
buy a 1.5TB or 2TB disk, and use it as the target both for local 
backups, and for tahoe. Subtracting local backups, this should leave (at 
least) around 1 or 1.5 TB for tahoe.

It will probably still take a few weeks until everything will be set up 
here, and there most probably will be a few round trips with questions I 
have, but for starters -- do you think the above makes sense? Do you 
have any particular hints or comments?

Cheers,
Chris




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