[Freedombox-discuss] Leaving the (proprietary) cloud - my roadmap for FB

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 04:29:34PM +0100, Alistair Davidson wrote:
>>
>> IIRC the last "distributed email" discussion on this list ended up on 
>> the problem of having a reliable smtp server on a box that might not 
>> be always online. As it was spotted, SMTP supports this case by 
>> having the ability to have secondaries MX, but then the problem was 
>> to store data on this (probably untrusty) MX.
>>
>
>An important question to me: can we extend this principle to other 
>services? In particular, mirroring public-facing web pages such as a 
>diaspora/gnu social page so that it is never offline but never hosted 
>insecurely? This may require the user action to establish a web of 
>trust - eg this is my best mate, he can host even my sensitive social 
>networking content, this other person is a work colleague and cannot.

Uh oh. Great challenge!

I suspect this is very much tied to the protocols used.

Some factors are multi-homing and replication.

Smtp supports _very_ flexible multi-homing through declaring MX records 
and then stting up those MX hosts as releays for that particular domain.

Smtp does *not*, however, support replication very well.  The design is 
tied to "delivering a message". In theory we could do "mesh relaying", 
i.e. when receiving a message as a relay and the final destination is 
unreachable, then resend same message to multiple otherrelays, and then 
at the final destination receive from all trusted friends and drop 
duplicates based on Message-ID.

In reality, however, I believe this is exactly the kind of things that 
makes faster alternatives to offlineimap less reliable: there is really 
no guarantee that the ID generated by the sender is really unique!

We could perhaps add a custom X-RelayMesh-ID header instead...?

I suspect, however, that we are much better off leaving smtp as-is for 
inband messaging, and use a more modern protocol like xmpp between known 
nodes vapable of using that.



For http there are proxying mechanism built into the protocol, but again 
it is by design meant to be tied to unique URLs...

Hm.  I think I should just shut up here, and hope someone has spend some 
years of a university life investigating these issues for us, and have 
implemented nice FLOSS solutions too, ready to package for Debian ;-)


 - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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