[tahoe-dev] porting the tahoe to the plug computer

[Paul Peter Adler]

(sorry for not replying to the real message but I joined the list some
minutes ago)

On Friday,2009-11-06, at 18:40 , Tony Lee wrote:

> I have access to some plugcomputers (1.2GHz ARM cpu that plug into
> any outlet)    http://plugcomputer.org/.
>
> I like to build to Tahoe on them.

This is a great relieve to know I am not the only one thinking about that.

> The system I have is running the full ubuntu for ARM already.
> Not the Karmic release yet, but soon.

I sure hope we get a Karmic release, but stock Ubuntu seems to not run
on the sheevaplug: [1]
Maybe Debian is an option.

Let me tell you about what I am envisioning - maybe it inspires
someone or initiates some discussion:
My own home uplink and that of some (5-10) friends of mine is a
standard ADSL connection with 6/0.5 Mbps bandwidth (that bad one being
upload of course). We all dislike power bills and backup problems and
most use Windows as a client OS and have no idea of anything else.
So what I did was buy a SheevaPlug[2] because it is cheap (<US$ 100)
and low-power. I put a 1TB-USB-harddrive with auto-powerdown to it and
experience <<10W power usage of the whole thing on average. Great.

Now for the dream part: Put the same setup to any of the friends'
house, install a storage node onto each, forward a TCP port to this
device (to tunnel NAT). On some high-bandwidth server (I have one, but
say a virtual root server) install a helper node to manage the
erasure-coding and distribution where crippled upload bandwidth leads
to problems

As for the clients: At least in theory, the win32 client should be
able to work against another grid. For now I am not sure if this needs
recompiling the client (bad) or only reconfiguration of the available
client (good). I hope it is not a sacrilege to propose that but I am
not keen to dump my 0.8TB raw photo data at allmydata.com for $99/year
- and they probably aren't either.

I appreciate any comment!

Regards, Paul

[1] http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=885.0
[2] http://www.marvell.com/products/embedded_processors/developer/kirkwood/sheevaplug.jsp