[Infrastructures] ISconf development

[Matt S Trout]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 09:49:18PM -0800, Steve Traugott wrote:
> Hi All!
> 
> I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for all of the kind
> words of encouragement over the last few weeks.  Among other things
> you've convinced me that I should start maintaining public releases
> again.  Here's the general plan right now:
> 
> - set up new site (SVN, bugs, wiki)
> - post v4 prototype code as-is

Any chance you could do this before the rest of the stuff's in place so we
can start having a play with it?

> - start project for ISFS (p2p app-layer filesystem)
> - start projects for Python and Perl rewrites (in parallel, on top of
>   ISFS)

Mmmm, and make sure we keep the plugin API identical; I dunno how you'd do
the converse but Inline::Python should allow the perl isconf to use python
plugins ...

> To recap about this ISFS thing -- right now I'm using UDP broadcasts, a
> little Perl HTTP daemon on each machine, and wget to keep a local cache
> directory in sync.  Crude but it works, and the code for it hasn't
> needed touching for over a year.  This needs to be expanded to do TCP
> WAN connections, selective cache purging, block-level data management,
> subdirectories, PGP-based ACLs, and locking. 
> 
> Rather than write all of the comm reliability, membership, and
> token-passing code from scratch, I'm thinking of taking a shortcut and
> writing ISFS on top of Spread (http://spread.org) -- let me know if
> anyone has any opinions about that, pro or con.

Spread looks pretty good to me - evaluated it in the past for projects that
never quite made it. There's python and perl libraries for it - and also
a POE::Component::Spread, which would allow us to use the POE framework and
components to do a lot of the work. I'll happily admit I'm biased in that
direction though because I'm (a) fairly familiar with POE and (b) think ISFS
looks like an entertaining thing to hack on :)

-- 
    Matt S Trout            Brag sheet:    http://trout.me.uk/services.html
LAMP, Infrastructure        Contact:       services@trout.me.uk
   and Automation
     specialist                                       Do it once. Do it right.