[tahoe-dev] newbie question

[Two Spirit]

Thanks for the help and support.  Always good to have a resident crank.
I'm still getting use to tahoe, got files stored and replicated
comments inline with some feature requests.

I've implemented GlusterFS, and Ceph test environments and still in the
hunt for
that enterprise scalable parallel distributed secure file system. There were
things I thought were better and things I thought were worse. Not to
think that my opinion actually is of much value. Just to
add my $0.02 to the collective, I liked the simple setup was the best of
the 3
-- how all files were created for you with minimum number of commands to
get
up and going. The focus on non-trusted remote stores was exactly what I
needed.
The things I didn't like is python didn't feel "enterprise" solution to me
--
I would have thought Java or C would have been used. I didn't like
how tahoe was not really well integrated with the operating system such
as "mkfs -t tahoe" or POSIX support. I'd much rather just have a NFS style
mount introducer:/tahoe /mnt/tahoe and run my standard "ls /mnt/tahoe" or
 "cd /mnt/tahoe; ls" instead of a non-standard "tahoe ls tahoe:".
The big worry for me is I haven't yet found all the documentation to the
internal workings of the file storage and my concern is if sht hits the fan
and I have to recover all the data, how do I go about doing that or where
do I even begin.


On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:

>
> It's IMHO a bug in tahoe that users get tracebacks for things that  are not
> internal software failures.  (That being my opinion does not help you,
> but I'm doing my duty as a resident crank.)
>
> By default, tahoe looks in $HOME/.tahoo (I think).  So you'll have to be
> careful about root vs non-root.
>
always a good rule not to run as root, but when I create file systems, I'm
usually
root, so I think this would be good to put a short warning in the
quickstart. My
confusion was that I thought I had to be a node and a client, so my node was
not in ~/.tahoe, but in /tmp/some-node-test-dir, didn't see the -d option.
I seriously
did look for some environment variable or something to set something like a
TAHOEHOME
so I wouldn't need some sort of -d option.
Would have been helpful to me to tell me this in the starter docs.

If you make a directory in other than the standard place ($HOME/.tahoe),
> you'll need to use "-d nodedir".   Note that the syntax is
>   tahoe maincommand -d $nodedir --other-options
> rather than the -d being first.
>
Now seriously, is this a feature, not a bug?

If you are trying to use the pubgrid, you don't need an introducer.
>
Website says pubgrid is no longer available due to hackers, but I thought it
would be worthless to use the public introducer since I wouldn't be able to
store anything anywhere unless I knew the secret handshakes with the in
crowd
(what I gathered from Zooko's email on Freenet vs Tahoe)


> Using the web ui to see the node status is hugely helpful.  If your node
> isn't connected, nothing useful is going to happen, but looking at the
> status will let you figure that out more directly.
>
I'm old school user and 2nd the need for command line and remote
shells, so while Web is NICE, I would still like a command line and text
version where I could output text
process it through perl or some scripts. Now I could do that with the web
UI, but just more work for me and everyone else. The web is not meet the
criteria of "eye candy".
I think a command line attracts the old farts and killer GUI client
apps attract the youngsters.
Webmin and other tools show that you can always add a web interface.

I saw some stuff on the web that looked wrong like
old deprecated test nodes still listed and couldn't see any files from the
webui, but being a
newbie my setup is still probably all wrong with lots of experimentation.
It gave me a sense that the
cleanup or timeouts weren't quite handled. I'm sure if I have a clean
setup, things would look just fine.
That just tells me things work. If the garbage collection is there, it
tells me not only that things work,
but they work well.

There should be a command-line version of the status page, but there
> seems not to be.
> I use "wget http://127.0.0.1:3456/ && more index.html" :-)
> Seriously, am I the only one who runs nodes on computers I am not
> sitting at?
>
> Unless you have a good reason, I'd run tahoe as yourself (or a non-root
> special user) rather than root.   My own practice is to have a tahoes
> ('tahoe server' uid) and run storage nodes and introducers with that
> uid.
>
> The pubgrid introducer seems down.  But I don't think you've gotten that
> far yet.
>   > telnet 74.207.252.227 50528
>   Trying 74.207.252.227...
>   telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
>
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