[tahoe-dev] ANN: grid-updates -- a Helper Script for Public Tahoe-LAFS Grids

[darrob]

Hello everybody,

grid-updates is a shell script intended to help keep Tahoe-LAFS nodes'
configurations up-to-date. It can retrieve lists of introducers as well
as news feeds from the Tahoe grid. This is useful for any public grid
that relies solely on volunteers.

On some public grids (especially the one on I2P) all nodes, even
introducers, are run by volunteers and may disappear at any given time.
Maintaining a list of all known introducers and distributing it to all
participants of the grid will ensure the best possible connectivity for
everyone.

Furthermore, there is no reliable way to contact node operators. This is
why we want to encourage users to subscribe to a news feed relevant to
their Tahoe grid. We hope it's going to be a way to inform unknown node
operators about their wrongly configured nodes, necessary updates,
recommended configuration changes and such.

The news feed can be read in plain text (and be delivered by cron mail)
or in HTML format (either directly or in an Iframe on the Tahoe node's
console page). There is also an Atom feed so users can use their regular
feed readers.

I think grid-updates has pretty good documentation so I'd like to refer
you to its Eepsite: http://darrob.i2p.us/grid-updates/
(http://darrob.i2p/grid-updates/ if you have I2P). I'll be happy to send
more information to the list as well, of course.

By the way, should you ever implement a node whitelist feature (which
we're really hoping for) it'll be easy to use grid-updates to update
that whitelist as well.

darrob