provide more automated setup assistant

[canercandan]

Hi guys,

Let's share with you an idea of application that I thought about tahoe-lafs. To be honest I did not see if someone has posted an idea like this, apologize if did.

The idea is to develop an application like an assistant wizard that we can execute as a top-level layer at the beginning or even after the installation of a distribution (OS). Several steps will be asked in this application. The idea is to make easy the integration of tahoe-lafs for everyone.

Here are the steps described as follows:

(1) Joining

The first step lets the choice between two ways:

• either to create an adhoc network (it means an introducer in tahoe-lafs vocabulary)
• or to join an existing introducer (to provide some "official" introducers like the idea behind the bigpig project)
• (an optional choice should be to join several introducer useful for the step (2))

(2) Contribution (optional)

This step analyzes your HDD and depending on your available data partitions it will ask you if you would like to contribute or not to the introducer joint at the previous step. If yes it will create a node and configure it to be auto mounted at starting. If several introducers was chosen then one node should be created for each introducer. (The nodes created at this step will not be used directly by the next steps.)

(3) User

This step consists to create a system user (cf. adduser) but unlike the traditional system we are going to integrate tahoe-lafs to the user. To do so, a created user also creates a client (as defined in tahoe-lafs vocabulary) which is assigned to this user. The client will be connected to the introducer chosen in the first step. (If several introducer was chosen, the default one will be used as this feature is only really used in the second step.) (It should be possible to create several users.)

(4) Home directory

One time the user is created with its own client, this step will ask to make a choice between two other ways:

• either to create a home directory as a cap (as defined in tahoe-lafs vocabulary too). (If several users was created then one cap is created for each user.)
• or to assign an existing cap URI to the created user (useful if you would like to have an access to the same data through several machines).

(5) Mounting

One time the home directory was created or assigned as a cap then this step will create an auto mounting point using the available protocols FTP/SFTP (or even gvfs if available ?) linked to the home directory of the created user. (If several users was created then one mountpoint for each user.)

(6) Logging

Then the created users are ready to login into the new [world|filesystem].

Thanks and please share your feedback.

[zooko]

Brian Warner has been working on related ideas about how people get introduced to a network of providers or users of hard drive space.