[tahoe-dev] switching from introducers to gossip?

[Greg Troxel]

  > In the friendnet, nearly all nodes are both a client *and* a server.

  This is not true of the grid I'm most familiar with: volunteergrid2.
  In that grid almost every node is either a client or a server --
  almost no nodes act as both. (I think. This is just judging from
  reading the volunteergrid2-l mailing list.)

It's also not true of the grid I run, where I run 4 servers on different
machines.   One of those (currently) has a a client, so my node list is

  machine1: introducer, server, client
  machine2: server
  machine3: server
  machine4: server
  machine5: client
  machine6: client

So, while on machine 1 I could run a single node, it doesn't make sense
to do so, because the server runs under  a tahoe uid and is serving the
grid, whereas the client  node has my uid and my tahoe aliases.  The
server node should not have any aliases; it doesn't have a need to know.

So I concur that friendnet does not imply 'each machine client and
server'.  I see friendnet as "each person runs a server that provides
storage to the group, and also has some clients".


So client/server vs p2p style is really about whether a person runs a
client node and a server node, or runs one node with both.  Coming from
a timesharing background rather than a PC background, I see the client
node as associated with a particular person (esp. given the private/ and
aliases file), and the server node assocaited typically with the
machine, although users could run servers with shares in their homedirs.
So I see the client/server joint node as a special case when you know
there is only one client.

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