Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News, issue number 41, October 30 2012

Welcome to the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News (TWN). Tahoe-LAFS is a secure, distributed storage system. View TWN on the web or subscribe to TWN. If you would like to view the "new and improved" TWN, complete with pictures; please take a look.

Announcement and News

Bunch of Redundant Independent Clouds

A software developer by the name of Bitcartel posted a long write-up on his blog about something named "BRIC" — "Bunch of Redundant Independent Clouds". It is a way to use consumer cloud storage services like Dropbox, Skydrive, and Google Drive as the storage backends in a Tahoe-LAFS grid.

It is the same general approach as Diego "sickness" Righi had posted earlier, which was covered in issue 31 of the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News. Bitcartel's "BRIC" comes with at least one added feature compared to Diego's: it comes with a patch to Tahoe-LAFS to limit how much space each storage server will use.

David-Sarah davidsarah mentioned in comments on Bitcartel's blog that the patch walks over all the files each repeatedly in order to determined how much space it is using. The "leasedb" feature that David-Sarah is working on at LeastAuthority.com Least Authority Enterprises will make it so the storage server can efficiently know the total space usage without having to walk over all the files.

Zooko zooko added BRIC to the Tips and Tricks page of the wiki.

Tahoe-LAFS on OpenWRT

Stephen Walker created patches to allow to be installed on OpenWRT.

"OpenWrt is described as a Linux distribution for embedded devices.

Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developer, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned." [0]

These patches will enable Tahoe-LAFS to run a large variety of embedded devices. Tahoe-LAFS is looking for a patch/package maintainer for OpenWRT and a volunteer to run an OpenWRT buildslave. If you are interested in either of these opportunities, please let us know. Once we have a maintainer, we will add OpenWRT ipkg to the current packages.

Glowing Quotes

“When it comes to support for open source, you guys are amazing. Many open source projects could aspire to be that good.”—Tony Arcieri <tony.arcieri@gmail.com>

Tahoe-LAFS on Twitter

Now we're debugging a network code bug in the Tahoe-LAFS client. This is fun! [1]

We got to the part of the Tahoe-LAFS source code which, when read aloud, is lyrics from the Rolling Stones. #TahoeLAFSSixthBirthdayParty [2]

You know how some birthday parties end with a mess to clean up? Ours ended with http://codepad.org/VWlyZHug #TahoeLafsSixthBirthdayParty [3]

Patches Needing Review of the Week

There are six (6) ticket still needing review for 1.10.0:

There are three (3) tickets still needing review of 1.11.0:

The Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News is published once a week by The Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation, President and Treasurer: Peter Secor peter . Scribes: Patrick "marlowe" McDonald marlowe , Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn , Editor Emeritus: Zooko. View TWN on the web or subscribe to TWN . Send your news stories to marlowe@antagonism.org — submission deadline: Friday night.