[WLANware] GSoC '10 - Distributed Small Storage System

[Mario Behling]

Ni hao Yin QUi,

thanks a lot for your questions. We would be very happy to work
together with you. It would be great if you could discuss this on the
following two IRCs.

irc.fu-berlin.de channel #freifunk
irc.freenode.net, channel #openwrt

I am also taking alx and nbd into CC, who originally proposed this idea.

Generally about our community: Freifunk is a network of projects
including Firmware devs of the Freifunk Firmware, OpenWrt (the basis
of the Firmware), routing protocols and nowadays even Open Hardware
projects. We are using this mailing list for general discussions and
as a start point for newcomers to direct them to the right group.

Have you been in touch with the Free and Open Source community and
Linux User Groups in China? Please let me know your blog and projects
links. Thank you.

Zaijian,

Mario


On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Yin QIU <qiuyin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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