[tahoe-dev] Using allmydata.com production grid?

[Peter Secor]

Hi David,

   We don't currently have a way of identifying particular servers or 
sets of servers to hold shares. Because of this, on our production 
network we like to control the storage servers, specifically the 
bandwidth to them. By design, any node can technically become a storage 
node, but operationally we are discouraging that for our production grid.

   There are at least two volunteer grids available in which everybody 
participates as a storage node. One can be accessed by the following 
introducer:

pb://6cypm5tfsv6ag43g3j5z74qx5nfxa2qq@207.7.145.200:64228,nooxie.zooko.com:64228/introducer

   and the other can be read about here:

http://blog.okfn.org/2009/05/13/launch-of-open-data-grid/

   I'm sure there are more that we don't know about :)

   A helper is a node which accepts encrypted data and performs the 
erasure coding as a service. We have several helpers in our colo and 
this allows users to only have to upload 1x of their data instead of 
3.3x (our expansion factor for erasure coding). For slow links, this is 
a big help.

Peter

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Fri May 29 2009, Peter Secor <secorp-AT-allmydata.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi David,
>>
>>    First, make sure that your servers are not acting as storage nodes. 
>> To do this, either touch the file no_storage in the node directory, or 
>> in the tahoe.cfg file make sure that in the [storage] section that the 
>> "enabled" flag is false.
> 
> OK.  So there's no way for my own servers to participate in providing
> storage for some of what I'm backing up?
> 
>>    The production introducer.furl is:
>>
>> pb://5qdmocdez2kwtdk7mbijybh32fac76gq@introducer.allmydata.com:38463/introducer
>>
>>    and the helper.furl is:
>>
>> pb://qg7wc5uvxkckkeayjkmra5st65ame67f@helper4.allmydata.com:51258/ztqhnbd5srnowmax7ivn5d6wjxgjy4kc
> 
> Thanks!  Just curious: what's a "helper?"
>