[Freedombox-discuss] distributed encrypted highly-available storage for the FreedomBox

[ian at churchkey.org]

Hi Rohit,

You should look into Tahoe LAFS: http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs

There are other ways we could do similar things, for instance, if all of 
your materials are distributed to your friends because they all join 
your bittorrent swarm of encrypted files and then decrypt them locally, 
you could simply re-download files from them by joining your own swarm.

-Ian

On 08/26/2010 09:48 AM, Rohit Kumar Mehta wrote:
>
> Hi guys, I've been lurking for a little while, but thinking about
> storage issues related to freedombox (or whatever the name will
> eventually be) and want to join the brainstorming.
>
> I have been running my own Linux servers since the 90's and was thinking
> during Ebens talk, "a $40 box that will do all this? no way!"
>
> People have already mentioned bandwidth issues, but there are also
> storage issues that are worth considering. No $40 box is going to be
> able to make available all the content that users want to have online.
> Modern computer users are used to ever growing amounts of easily
> accessible cloud storage via Gmail and dropbox. So we will have to
> connect these Guruplugs (or whatever device) to USB storage or plan for
> a more expensive device which includes storage which will raise the
> price, but I don't think that will make it unacceptable.
>
> But also a lot of the functionality of the private cloud comes from high
> availability. If I leave something on my personal FreedomBox/server and
> want to download it when I'm travelling, an extended power outage or a
> hardware failure might be a real drag. But there's no reason all of
> these freedom boxes cannot work together and do some kind of p2p
> clustered filesystem. I don't mind storing my data on your freedom box's
> storage, as long as each file is encrypted the proper way. There might
> be some files I want to be decrypted only by me, some decryptable to
> friends et cetera. A model could be devised where every user who wants
> say 1 GB on the freedombox cloud, needs to contribute 2-3 GB of personal
> storage and some file indexing services.
> If others agree with me that a distributed, encrypted, highly available
> storage system is worth implementing, I'm happy to research existing
> protocols or help with designing and implementing a new protocol if
> necessary. Also, if others are interested in working on this feature,
> I'd love to work with you.
>
> Rohit
>
>
>