The Tahoe-LAFS Bitcoin Grid - topic

[kiba]

I am setting aside some time to experiment with Tahoe-LAFS. If all goes well, I will fulfill my promise to pledge 5 BTC for a bitcoin payment solution.

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[Anonymous]

Someone should do a dropbox replacement using tahoe lafs.

[kiba]

Someone should do a dropbox replacement using tahoe lafs.

Nobody is going to do it for free....and even if they, they're probably occupied with an open source project.

[BioMike]

I've been following Tahoe-LAFS for some time now, and IMHO it is not suited for the thing I wanted to use it for. If people go off-line for some reason and the node doesn't say that to the introducer (e.g. network split, someone pulls his network cable, wifi?) the whole grid will become unresponsive due to the fact that clients try to contact that node. This is especially the case for small grids, on larger grids, this might not be such a big problem. But I haven't tested the latter. A people posted about this on the mailing list last few weeks.

[kiba]

I got it running, but I don't know how to use introducer. I think this tahoe-lafs thing is more difficult than it needs to be.

[slush]

Is anybody still experimenting actively with a Tahoe-LAFS grid?

Yes, I'm using it almost year very intensively (for backups ~50GB). I even made binding for pyfilesystem https://code.google.com/p/pyfilesystem so anybody can mount Tahoe-LAFS as normal drive (Windows, Linux, Mac).

Unfortunately there is no real effort for accounting, I think joining Tahoe and Bitcoin would be great. Unfortunately everybody who says that running Tahoe-LAFS is too much complicated is right. There is effort to simplify installation on all platforms, but IMHO it is not ready for end user yet. On the other side, TahoeLAFS is great piece of software!

Question to stability - there were made massive improvements and I can say it is pretty stable now. But I don't know which type of connection uses peers in my grid.

[slush]

I got it running, but I don't know how to use introducer. I think this tahoe-lafs thing is more difficult than it needs to be.

The simplest way is to join public grid http://pubgrid.tahoe-lafs.org/.
Second way is to run own introducer by running 'tahoe create-introducer' command.
Last way, if you are interested, you may ask to access to volunteergrid.

In any case, you will get introducer's strange URL started with pb:// which you have to enter to ~/.tahoe/tahoe.cfg under "introducer.furl". Then start your node and everything will work!

[kiba]

It said I have zero peers after I wrote the stuff for my introducer node or whatever.

[zooko]

that's what i did, i just couldn't get it to work.

What was the error message? Or what step didn't work?

Thanks.

Zooko

[zooko]

3. Now install MingW as described in the "What if that doesn't work?" part. Install it in C:\MingW This is not optional as the wiki might suggest.

What didn't work when you built it without MingW? MingW really should be optional and if it was required for you then I'd like to know why. It probably means there is a 3rd party library that for some reason isn't hosted here:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html

But I really need to know which library was missing or which other error was encountered in order to fix it.

I used file: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Automated%20MinGW%20Installer/mingw-get-inst/mingw-get-inst-20100909/mingw-get-inst-20100909.exe/download It is important to check the c++ compiler, base system, development system and the build system when you get that option to select it. This is different then what is told on the wiki.

I installed this initially in C:\Program Files\Tahoe-LAFS. This does not work. The space in "Program Files" causes problems, so install it in C:\Tahoe-LAFS

Could you please update the wiki page to fix it so the next person won't hit these two issues?

[kiba]

So erm, I have no peers.

[kiba]

I figured out how to use it, with some difficulty and some heart jumping moment.(Do not post URI to private data)

[BioMike]

3. Now install MingW as described in the "What if that doesn't work?" part. Install it in C:\MingW This is not optional as the wiki might suggest.

What didn't work when you built it without MingW? MingW really should be optional and if it was required for you then I'd like to know why. It probably means there is a 3rd party library that for some reason isn't hosted here:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/README.html

But I really need to know which library was missing or which other error was encountered in order to fix it.

It was some time ago when I did this, hope I remember it correctly. I was doing  an install from source. The "optional part" that I was talking about, was the location of MingW. The wiki says you could put it anywhere, but spaces in the Windows filesystem aren't respected, causing problems (I initially installed it in C:\Program Files\MingW).

I used file: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Automated%20MinGW%20Installer/mingw-get-inst/mingw-get-inst-20100909/mingw-get-inst-20100909.exe/download It is important to check the c++ compiler, base system, development system and the build system when you get that option to select it. This is different then what is told on the wiki.

I installed this initially in C:\Program Files\Tahoe-LAFS. This does not work. The space in "Program Files" causes problems, so install it in C:\Tahoe-LAFS

Could you please update the wiki page to fix it so the next person won't hit these two issues?
[/quote]

I'll put it on my ToDo list. I don't have access to a MS Windows system atm. If someone here does a fresh install with the new version on MS Windows, feel free if this is still an issue and adjust the wiki as accordingly.

P.S. There is also a multiple-introducer, people might want to try that.

[kiba]

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2236.0

For those who want bitcoin/tahoe-lafs integration, pledge your bitcoin where your mouth is.

[jgarzik]

For those who want bitcoin/tahoe-lafs integration, pledge your bitcoin where your mouth is.

I am more interested in technical details.  How would bitcoin be integrated?  Has anyone even sketched out such a scenario with sufficient technical detail?

Do the maintainers of Tahoe-LAFS plan bitcoin integration, or is this simply something bitcoiners think would be a good idea?

If bitcoin integration was not planned from the beginning, maybe we can come up with a better system with better incentives.

[zooko]

I am more interested in technical details.  How would bitcoin be integrated?  Has anyone even sketched out such a scenario with sufficient technical detail?

Do the maintainers of Tahoe-LAFS plan bitcoin integration, or is this simply something bitcoiners think would be a good idea?

We Tahoe-LAFS hackers are actively working on "accounting", which means enabling storage servers and storage clients to discriminate among one another and to track which ones are used for how much storage. There is extensive technical detail available, although some of it may be for an earlier design than the current effort:

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/query?status=!closed&keywords=~accounting&order=priority

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/QuotaManagement

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/AccountingDesign

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/docs/proposed/accounting-overview.txt

A digital payment scheme such a BitCoin would probably fit into Tahoe-LAFS pretty easily once we have accounting.

Nobody has written it down in great detail, but several of the Tahoe-LAFS developers have a lot of ideas about it. There is significant interest, for example Brian Warner—who is currently the leader in "most lines of code in the current version of Tahoe-LAFS"—went so far as to reimplement some BC functionality in Python a couple of months ago.

The basic idea is merely that a storage server agrees to store and serve your data only if pay it. There are a large number of details that would need to be worked out beyond that basic idea of course. I currently think a long-term relationship would probably work better than a per-transaction micropayment, so for example you could deliver a payment to each of your storage servers once per month in return for continued service.

If bitcoin integration was not planned from the beginning, maybe we can come up with a better system with better incentives.

Tahoe-LAFS is great at what it is designed for—reliable (secure) distributed storage. If that's what you want, then I encourage you to use or extend Tahoe-LAFS. If you want a substantially different sort of behavior then I would like to learn more about your use case.

[Sawzall]

Looking around the Tahoe site, I see a lot of todo items with dates going back to 2008. Does anyone have a sense for how active the development is on this project?

[zooko]

Pshaw, 2008 is nothing—we have open tickets from 2007!

http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/20

You can see recent activity by looking at the trac timeline or the tahoe-dev mailing list, or the tahoe-lafs-weekly-news mailing list.

Regards,

Zooko

[Sukrim]

Is it possible to integrate different transport protocols into Tahoe? I'm especially interested in the Storage server <---> gateway transport, as this would be really cool if it could be done via BitTorrent (announced on DHT).

Btw. a really nice sum of BTC you got in your donation account there! Maybe it's time to set some bounties here in the forum to get some work done?