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Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

blog.infinit.one

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Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#71

Post by knorker »

pjc50 wrote: post #60
lispython wrote: post #59

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel inte…

everything was connected and uniform I've never been entirely clear whether this referred to 'everything within the Plan9 organisation' or 'everything visible from a Plan9 machine including external independent systems'. The former is much easier to achieve. So much of the nonuniformity is because of competing administrative domains.

"Everything that was on my machine was uniform because I wrote it from scratch to work the way my brain works"

Yeah… that doesn't scale, no matter who you are, mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name".

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#72

Post by aidenn0 »

lispython wrote: post #59

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel inte…

On P9 at Bell labs, everything could be connected and uniform. In the real world with corporate firewalls, HTTPS is very nearly the only reliable option for connecting to other computers.

On top of that, the fact that most workstations in this world do not have public IP addresses, and p2p becomes really a non-starter.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#73

Post by Aleman360 »

lispython wrote: post #59

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel inte…

Seems like a leaky abstraction. Did their interfaces have a way to account for differences in latency and failure modes, or was that hidden?

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#74

Post by rakoo »

chronial wrote: post #61
lispython wrote: post #59

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel inte…

What is new about this, is that it is none of the three things that your quote listed as possibilities. The new thing is a remote storage that has a smartly synchronized local "cache".

Nothing could prevent a remote filesystem to have a local cache, actually this is what every remote filesystem would implement quite soon.

The real novelty of Infinit is that you can mix and match multiple storages and build a unified filesystem with encryption on top of this. Roughly something like truecrypt over aufs over (sftp+local fs+s3fs+whateveryouwantfs)

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#75

Post by ccrone »

amluto wrote: post #69
jug wrote: post #49

This is really interesting for my growing photo archive where syncing isn't important (and even potentially problematic) but where covenience is! I need to take a look at this, thanks.

For uses like this, I really want the ability to prevent any user (myself included) from deleting or modifying preexisting files: no matter how a client screws up, I want to be able to get old data back. I wonder how Infinit handles this.

We plan to add versioning for exactly this. It's on our roadmap which you can find here: https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#77

Post by rakoo »

Uberphallus wrote: post #43
cadeuh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's indeed similar to Tahoe-LAFS. The largest differences are that you can build hybrid infrastructures with Infinit (local storage and cloud storage) and that we try to make it really accessible and easy to setup. We made a comparison page that sums it up here: https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs

Tahoe is listed as homogeneous, but there are arbitrary backends, including cloud ones like Dropbox.

Note exactly, Tahoe only has Tahoe nodes chatting between each other; it can be the decision of a given Tahoe node to actually store content in the cloud rather than on the local file system, but that's a node-specific decision, not something that each Tahoe client has to speak.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#79

Post by zymhan »

aidenn0 wrote: post #72
lispython wrote: post #59

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel inte…

On P9 at Bell labs, everything could be connected and uniform. In the real world with corporate firewalls, HTTPS is very nearly the only reliable option for connecting to other computers. On top of that, the fact that most workstations in this world do not have public IP addresses, and p2p becomes really a non-starter.

First of all, you can just tunnel whatever storage protocol over HTTPS if needed. The point of the quote is that we could be using Operating Systems that abstract away the various kinds of storage available so that you can use whatever combination of options work for you.

It's like if everyone was using Linux and paid for plans from for example a cloud storage provider, but was able to reliably and automatically mount their storage like any other network share.

With open technology and widespread fast internet, it's really not that hard to accomplish. We've already got the former. Now we just need a lot more of the latter.

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