Re: [Tails-dev] Tahoe-LAFS persistence

Delete this message

Reply to this message
Author: Greg Troxel
Date:  
To: David Stainton
CC: tahoe-dev, The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Tahoe-LAFS persistence
David Stainton <dstainton415@???> writes:

> Since Tahoe-LAFS is not a posix compliant filesystem...
> we cannot easily create a persistent volume that only
> stores data on a Tahoe grid. There is an ugly FUSE hack
> but it is extremely ineffient.


This can be viewed as a bug in tahoe :-)
But seriously, fixing the FUSE interface would be a great contribution.
It's not clear to me how efficient the FUSE interface has to be before
it isn't the limiting issue; tahoe is not a fast filesystem.

> So there should be three options per persistent file-set:
> 1. do not persist
> 2. persist to local media
> 3. persist to local media AND a Tahoe-LAFS grid


Are you proposing to store the capabilities to access the persistent
data on the local media (removable flash, I'm assuming)? I've come
into this thread somewhat late, but the security and usability
properties are not entirely clear to me.

> For the use case where you only want to store the data in
> the Tahoe grid... then simply use the Tahoe commandline
> tools to upload the file(s).


That seems like it could easily be:

4. persist to tmpdir and then upload to tahoe, deleting the tmp file.

I think the state of the FUSE interface isn't all that relevant if
you're going to add code for tahoe anyway. The "tahoe cp" interface is
very dos/mtools, but quite workable, even if it would be better to be
able to use a standard VFS interface.

Greg
(resident old-school unix crank on the tahoe list)