LeraoSoft - Knowledge Distributed

It has been a long time since we have updated and we figure it’s time for a status update.The first question i’d like to answer is what have we been doing with our time.  The answer is of course being code monkeys.   In our last post we said that it worked but there was still a lot of work to do.  Of that work we now have message authentication and moved all of the configurations into one file.  Also lots of cleaning has been done with more to do.  The final improvement is in usability.  Users and Storage Nodes will be able to automatically register.  This means that installation will be extremely easy just drop some files and change the configuration a little and wuala. Speaking of Wua.la I’d like to take some time to talk about our “Competitors”.  Of them there really are only two one is RobuSTore and the other is Wuala.  First lets talk about RobuSTore they are the closest thing to our project and are from UC SD.  They use LT Codes like our project does and have some of the same goals.  What is different is that they are concerned mostly with speed and want some redundancy on top of that, and are also concerned with large files on a pre configured network.  They do not use multicast or peer to peer systems (or so it appears) and they know where all the bits of data are.  This is different from our goals.  We hope to have a fast system yes but we want a dynamic system on unreliable dynamically configured networks with unreliable disks and computers in a word Byzantine.  The reason for this is that we want to replace SANS and NAS with peoples laptops and PC’s not with cheaper servers.  We also want the network to be flexible and work in a peer to peer way so that it can recover from individual network failures.Wuala on the other hand is very different they use ReedSolomon encoding which while an optimal erasure code is much more computationally complex and would slow down storage.  Also ReedSolomon does not scale with the number of nodes in a dynamic way it needs pre defined variables to encode and decode thus is not Rate-less like LT Codes are.  It also works in a peer to peer system though.  However it is designed to be a “web service” instead of something a company could have for their personal use.  It is also designed to be very distributed and has no central meta data storage which would not work for companies who need to know who saved what and get access to it.  Also by the end of the quarter we will have a paper we will try to get published.