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| 3 | This page is about the "Test Grid", which is also called the "pubgrid". The pubgrid has several purposes: |
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| 5 | * to make it easier for people new to tahoe to begin to experiment |
| 6 | * to enable small-scale trial use of tahoe |
| 7 | * to help the tahoe community gain experience with grids of heterogenous servers without a pre-existing social organization |
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| 9 | The pubgrid also has a critical non-goal |
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| 11 | * The pubgrid is not intended to provide large-scale storage, and it is not intended to be reliable. Don't store any data in the pubgrid if losing it would cause trouble. |
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| 13 | == Cautions == |
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| 15 | The canonical way to access tahoe-lafs grids is to run your own client node. Having one's own node is necessary for the data that should remain private (plaintext, capabilities) to remain on your computers, while storage nodes provide storage of ciphertext. However, the pubgrid has a publically-accessible gateway; using this means plaintext of files and capabilities are exposed on the Internet. Even worse, writing to the publically-writable test directory (below) means that others can see and change your files. |
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| 17 | Do not confuse the security properties one gets with tahoe when running a client node with how the public web interface behaves. |
| 62 | By running a client node, you can store data in the pubgrid. The storage is provided by people who run storage nodes, and they share disk space and network capacity as a courtesy to the tahoe community in order to help newcomers and promote experimentation. |
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| 64 | DRAFT FOR DISCUSSION!! |
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| 66 | Norms for the pubgrid are similar to those for some private grids: |
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| 68 | * If you are just trying out tahoe and not contributing a server, only store a small amount of data, perhaps 1-20 MB. |
| 69 | * If you are a more serious pubgrid participant, contribute some amount of disk space and run stable servers with public IP addresses (so that clients can connect to them). Then, only store about half as much in shares (3.3x expansion for 3/10 encoding) as you provide in storage. |
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| 71 | Suggested server setup: |
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| 73 | * Enable expiration with 1-month lease maximums on your node, to keep it from just filling up. |
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