[WLANware] GSoC '10 - Distributed Small Storage System

[Yin QIU]

Hi,

I am Yin Qiu from Nanjing University, China,  and I want to implement
the distributed small storage system mentioned in your GSoC ideas
page. I don't know who the exact contact of this idea is, so I'm
writing to this list. Hoping I'm not making a noise :-)

I have great interest in developing networking applications and also
had development experience with P2P systems. For example, my B.S.
thesis project was a text search engine built upon a DHT. I developed
that system in Java based on the open-source Pastry implementation -
FreePastry [1]. So I think I can be competent to carry out this GSoC
project.

As for the idea, I think CFS [2] and PAST [3] could be a good starting
point. They are both storage systems on top of a structured P2P
network. Our system should be something similar to them. We could
develop with an existing DHT library, e.g., DHash [4]. However, there
must be more speciifc requirements in Freifunk's usage. Stored
information is probably in small pieces rather than large data blocks,
for instance. In order to make my future project proposal more
practicable, I have two questions:

1) Is Lua binding a firm requirement? I'm asking this because I don't
know the Lua language. Though I could spend some time learning it,
that would bring some unnecessary burden and therefore possibly delay
the project.
2) How would this storage system be used? The idea description simply
says it will aid DNS queries and IP autoconf. But what is the exact
role of a storage system? Could anyone explain this with DNS as an
example?

Thank you.


[1] FreePastry. http://www.freepastry.org/FreePastry/.
[2] F. Dabek, M. F. Kaashoek, D. Karger, R. Morris, and I. Stoica.
Wide-area cooperative storage with CFS. In Proceedings of the
Eighteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages
202–215, 2001.
[3] P. Druschel and A. Rowstron. Past: A large-scale, persistent
peer-to-peer storage utility. In HOTOS ’01: Proceedings of the Eighth
Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, page 75, Washington, DC,
USA, 2001. IEEE Computer Society.
[4] The Chord/DHash project. http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/chord/.

-- 
Yin QIU
Nanjing University, China