MojoNation ... Corporate Backup Tool? 122
zebziggle writes "I've been watching the Mojo Nation project off and on over the last couple of years. Very cool concept. While taking a look at the site recently. They've morphed into Hive Cache a P2P corporate backup solution. Actually, it sounds like a great way to use those spare gigs on the hd."
Interesting, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:1)
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:1)
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:1)
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you mean unrestricted access? I don't think this is talking about using Joe Foo's kaaza shared folder to store your company's backup data - it's using unused disk space on the company network, and the web sites states that the backup mesh is encrypted, so unauthorised users may have the file on their disk, but they can't access it.
Looks to me like all the criterea of the DPA are covered.
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:1)
MojoNation didn't run at all! (Score:2)
Somehow this experience (installing MojoNation and trying for a few days to figure out what it was actually supposed to do) does not make me eager to try their latest product. Give me a huge hard disk and rsync, please!
Re:MojoNation didn't run at all! (Score:1)
Particularly it annoyed me that I couldn't get a feeling for what was happening. I tried uploading a few files, none came through. I tried looking for some files, but it seems like that was before it was useful at all.
All in all I think that shows that a static web interface is not suitable for this type of app.
Re:MojoNation didn't run at all! (Score:1)
I've sent in an odd patch or two; I think it's worth my time. By the way the file publishing/sharing stuff is only one practical use for it; I've thought about writing some sort of mail store using Mnet/EGTP, for example.
Incredible Vanishing Website (Score:2)
- When, and why, did it become 'unavailable'?
- What's taking them so long to make it available again? (Or won't HiveCache work for them to retrieve their old files?)
Seriously, people, If you want to revamp your entire website, you just before you start editing it, and set up all your new stuff in a separate directory hierarchy (like www.mojonation.net/hivecache/*). That way all the old URLs still work.The only reason I can think of why any of the old stuff is unavailable is that they're still trying to figure out what they want to keep that way.
Fundamentally flawed (Score:3, Informative)
50 PC's in your Intranet, each with a 20GByte disk. Thus your backup need is a cool 1000 GByte, if the disks are all fully filled and fully backed-up...
For this concept to work you can see that you need to exclude every copy of Dos95/Office from being backed-up. The basis of P2P is the the service users are also the service provides, thus every participating node needs free HD space. Depending on the crypto overhead and your non-backup portion, you still need a lot of free space for this concept. What is the added value above a reduntant RAID server? Is the total cost of ownership really lower?
MojoNation proposed an awsome concept with their virtual P2P credits. However, this idea seems to suggest that P2P technology increases you HD size, it does not!
Just my 5 EuroCents,
J.
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:2, Insightful)
(2) Note that encrypted data can be compressed (and should be, to reduce entropy, and result in stronger encryption). Thus, those large
(3) Your doomsday estimates of size needs are way off. Exactly how many megs of unique files does each user on a corporate lan need? Most of the files are identical DLLs and OS, which this application already handles.
nit pick (Score:1)
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:1)
No, your reasoning is what's flawed
I do wonder about security, and about using multi-user files like databases. What if I do a bulk INSERT and everybody else is shutting down their PC's?
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:1)
If you'd use this concept for the user's workareas with documents and maybe configuration data from your servers and have a way of transparently access the p2p backupped data, this could indeed be of benefit for your company.
Cu
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:2)
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:2)
When one node gets a virus then the checksum for infected files will change meaning that those files will become "unshared." A properly working hive then should have a version of that file with the orginal checksum still shared across all the uninfected hosts, plus a backup of the infected file for those hosts that have been infected.
If you restore from an infected file then you'll get the virus back. This is the nature of backups.
Re: Fundamentally flawed (Score:1)
Each node would store encrypted chunks of data; without a map of the chunks that make up a file, it wouldn't be able to reconstruct the original file. So a node could get infected by a virus, but the virus couldn't infect the chunks. If you put a file together from chunks from nodes that are infected, the reassembled file is not infected (unless you backed up an infected file).
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:1)
I work for a large (~50k+ employees) organization, and the vast majority of our workstations have 1-15GB free on their drives. It almost never gets used because most of the large-volume users are too paranoid to store anything locally for fear of it getting erased.
I could see something like this being really handy, especially since we do deal in multi-terabytes of disk space for certain applications.
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:2)
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:1)
Re:Fundamentally flawed (Score:1)
Not really, if done well. (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the biggest single file on my system is my Microsoft Outlook Mailbox, which is in a proprietary format that doesn't make incremental backups possible. Since we're laptop-users who go out in the field a lot, we need to keep the mailboxes on our PCs, not on the server. While the best solution is "So don't use Outlook, then",/i>, in a lot of corporate environments, that's an unrealistically lost battle.
The other big concern I'd have is that, while the system looks really cool for desktop PC users, it's less practical for an environment where everybody uses laptops and on any given day, half the people are out of the office at customer locations or working from home on slow connections - so their PCs are much less usable as a backup mechanism, and may not have the bandwidth half the time.
Sounds tasty! (Score:2, Funny)
But seriously, I can imagine that it will only be good on larger scale corporate networks with lots of "enterprise PCs", as they put it...
Re:Sounds tasty! (Score:2)
-Billy
Re:Sounds tasty! (Score:2)
And I don't think that it would be used on the internet, at least not for important stuff... Open source development might work... Maybe...
Re:Sounds tasty! (Score:1)
Re:Sounds tasty! (Score:2)
ISP screwed the disk or something, and he's taking a LOOOOONG time reloading it...
In the meantime, get it here: http://game01.comhjem.dk - it's the second link...
Mojo Jojo? (Score:1, Funny)
Security? (Score:2)
But besides security, I see it as a solution in search of a problem. It's easy to back-up one system to another with the current tools, and it would happen in a much more simple, organized, and controlled manner.
Re:Security? (Score:1)
I also do not think that the passwd db will be treated as any other file.
If you're using w2k servers I think that they already send out encrypted password files whenever they want.
Who needs order and control?
Actually I think this is a pretty cool backup solution in some areas. I wouldn't use it at my workplace, maybe in a few years.
Re:Security? You must be a mastermind! (Score:1)
Re:Patents Pending on Mojo Nation? (Score:1, Interesting)
As far as patents go... well, according to even posts here, this was a rather unique approach to a p2p program. However, it HELPS to actually wait to see (or research) the patent before you actually go trying to dispute it or find prior art refuting it. This isn't one-click-of-your-mouse, you know. Not to mention, they haven't threatened to go after anything, I'd say they were even supporting the LGPL fork.
As it states.. "the patent-pending technology of MojoNation" click on the "MojoNation" hive-hex and you will find all the links and relevant information. (Or at least the fact that some of it will be available soon.) So, yes, you are misunderstanding.
Are you interested in taking away the ability of an OSS (and P2P) contributing company to defend their ideas (and work, and money) from corporate interests that might be interested in stealing their ideas? [No arguments from those of you interested in dismantling the patent system entirely -- I feel that way sometimes, too; we're talking level playing field right now.]
I hope their software is better than their grammar (Score:1, Offtopic)
Seriously - if someone can't make the effort to check their grammar before posting a web page... - oh, hang on, I'm reading slashdot - nevermind...
cLive ;-)
GPL? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:GPL? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:GPL? (Score:2)
The problem happens if someone else patents something about the code that you are releasing. You may well not know. In fact, you usually won't know. This means that the people who receive the code won't be informed. But whenever someone receives code licensed under the GPL, to which an unrelated party has a patent that isn't licensed, then they are forbidden to redistribute the code.
However, the patent law is so bad, that not even an ordinary lawyer can give you a reasonable guess as to whether or not you are in violation of a particular patent, except in certain very clear cases. In fact, I beleive that ordinary lawyers are forbidden from expressing an opinion on coverage. (I already have this at second or third hand, however, so don't take it as too credible.)
<rant>
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that almost nobody knows whether or not they are in violation of some patent or other, and often not even whether or not they are in violation of some particular patent. Even after studying the matter. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that this happened by accident, particularly as it is so in line with certain practices espoused by certain branches of the clergy.
This is one of the many vile effects that cause me to contend that the patent laws are so bad that we'd be better off without having ANY of them. Am I in violations of Joe Dingflaps patent on the automatic dog wiper? I sure don't think so, but I won't know for sure until a patent law court rules on the matter. And I really won't, not even though all I originate is programs. But the court could find some description of a process in the automatic dog wiper patent that is sufficiently similar to something that I do in my program. I wouldn't know about it. I couldn't predict it. If the specific claim of similarity had been made to me, I might well not have seen it, but as it happened, when I was designing my program I didn't check out the old patent on dog bottom wipers. So I didn't notice the interesting description he has on how the sensor information is processed to judge when to wipe. And even when I notice it, it looks to me like a trivial similarity. But the judgement call is made by the patent court. And they aren't programmers, they are lawyers. And lawyers of a particular sort, that only specialize in patents.
</rant>
Re:GPL? (Score:2)
The copyright holder of a piece of GPLed code isn't bound by the terms of the GPL, only the licensees are -- so if they accepted no 3rd-party code while developing the software openly, they're now under no obligation to grant all users free access to the involved patents.
Re:GPL? (Score:2)
Re:GPL? (Score:2)
Yes, they can. The GPL can never bind copyright holders -- they agree to nothing in releasing code under it, except that they'll allow someone else to redistribute code if they agree to certain conditions. Once again: Sections 7 and 8 have no effect on the copyright holder, who can still release the software, GPLed, if they wish, even if it is patent-encumbered. There's little use to doing this -- nobody else will be able to comply with the GPL, and so nobody else will be able to redistribute this "GPLed" software, thus breaking the spirit of the GPL (and likely the intent of the copyright holder). Nonetheless, it still follows that patent-encumbered code can indeed be released under the GPL by the copyright holder(s).
Here is the patent (I think) (Score:2)
I only see mention of a patent (singular) pending on their "MojoNation" page [mojonation.net]. Where else do they mention a patent or multiple patents?
It looks to me like it is US patent application number 20010037311 [uspto.gov]. I am definitely not a lawyer, but it looks like the patent is on a method for determining how much use each computer gets to make of the system based on what they provide to the system, and not on the concept of P2P backup in general. I certainly hope I'm reading this right because I have my own P2P backup software that I'm about to release and I don't want to run afoul of their. I know there's plenty of prior art for P2P backup in general out there, but most people don't want a drawn out legal battle even if they're right.
The problem with Open Source? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The problem with Open Source? (Score:1)
"...also, companies have credibility... entrust all my corporate data to a package written by x distributed geeks - er, no thanks."
Go tell that all the Fortune 500 companies that use OpenSSL for their encryption, or Apache for their Web Servers, or sendmail, or the GIMP (very commonly used by companies designing CG). Open standards are what the The Internet work - we'd all be screwed if TCP/IP wasn't used in the same way by every node trying to talk to each other...
Mojonation and backups (Score:5, Interesting)
P2P falls into two categories nowadays, file sharing (FastTrack/Kazaa, Gnutella/Gnucleus-Shareaza-Limewire-Bearshare, Edonkey2000) or publishing (Freenet and Mnet/Mojonation). Like Freenet, Mojonation was more of a publishing network - users publish data, it gets broken into little chunks, encrypted, and then sent out to other computers, and you receive other people's encrypted chunks on your computer making you a "block server". Content trackers and Publication trackers kept track of the meta-data and where the blocks were, and metatrackers kept track of where the trackers (also called brokers) were. I chatted with zooko, one of the developers, on IRC, he was cool and the ideas were very interesting. Like many dot-com stories, it was ahead of it's time in many ways. They converted Mojonation to the open source MNet [sourceforge.net] , whose CVS tree you can peruse. A lot of it is in Python, a language I do not know.
The wasted disk space on workstations (and servers) is something thought about by many, especially in large organizations with large networks. My last company began implementing SANs, so that less disk space would be wasted, and the centralization of disk space allowed for greater redundancy and easier backup. They also ran low priority (nice'd) distributed.net [distributed.net] processes across the whole network on non-production machines. You can take a guess about how large the network is by seeing that they're still ranked #22 without submitting any keys for a year.
Technical Information (Score:5, Informative)
For security reasons we absolutely want to encrypt and sign everything stored on the other computers. There is nothing tricky about this part, the usual cryptography can be used without modifications. This is not going to waste any significant amount of storage space or network bandwidth. But it will require some CPU cycles.
The other not so trivial part of such a system is the redundancy. Reed-Soloman would be one type of redundant coding suitable for the purpose. Parchive [sourceforge.net] also uses this coding.
I know some implementations are limited to at most 255 shares, but for performance reasons, it is probably not feasible to use a lot more than that anyway. I expect the Reed-Soloman code to be the most CPU hungry part of such a system.
We need to choose a threshold for the system, I see no reason why the individual users cannot choose their own threshold. If one user want to be able to reconstruct data from 85 shares, there need to be three times as much backing storage as the data being backed up.
The first approach to storage space would obviously be, that each user can consume as much as he himself makes available to the system. I'd happily spend the 10GB harddisk space needed for two backups of my 1.5GB of important data with a factor three of redundancy. This would if done correctly give a lot better security than most other backup solutions.
One important aspect you may never forget in such a system is the ability to verify the integrity of backups, I guess this is the most tricky part of the design. Verifying with 100% security that my backup is still intact would require downloading enough data to reconstruct my backup. However verifying with 99.9999999% security could require significantly less samples to be made. Unfortunately here the 255 shares can be a major limitation, the larger the number of shares gets the smaller the percentage of data we need to sample gets. I don't wanna do the exact computations right now, but if 18 randomly picked from the 255 shares are all intact, we have approximately the 9 nines of security that there are indeed 85 intact shares of the 255. So we have indeed limited the network usage by almost a factor of five.
If we want:
- Higher security
- Less network usage for verifications
- Good network performance even in case of a few percent of lost
shares
we need more than 255 shares of data. There is no theoretical limit to the number of shares, but the CPU usage increases.What the system also needs is migration of data as users join and leave the system, and a reliable way to detect users responsible for large amounts of lost shares. Creating public key pairs for each user is probably necessary for this. I think this can be done without the need of a PKI, a user can just create his key pair and then start building a reputation.
Re:Redundant backups (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead, you do what RAID 5 does, you stripe the data, across multiple peers, with a checksum block on another. This way your data is still safe if one of your peers goes down. More clever striping and checksum algorithms can cope with more than one peer going down, up to some limit.
If a large number of your peers go down at once, then your data is lost, but that is only likely to happen if something catastrophic happens, such as your office building burning down, or being hit by a tornado. In that case it would be time to turn to your of site backups, as no P2P backup strategy would be of any use.
It is worth remembering that the whole point of this system, is to get people back to work as fast as possible, if they accidentally loose a relatively small amount of data. It is designed to complement, not replace, an offsite tape backup strategy.
I hope this helps.
codes (Score:1)
The Reed Solomon codes will tend to outperform a simple checksum. In coding theory there are two desirable traits:
Distance ~ the amount of damage the code can take and still reproduce a perfect copy of the original
Efficiency ~ size of the code relative to size of the original data.
In the case of Raid 5 (on say 6 disks) for each 5 bits you have a distance of 2 (i.e. any 1 bit on any drive can get destroyed), and an efficiency of 5/6ths. By clumping data in larger chunks than 5 bits you can get efficiency very close to 100% while at the same time boosting the distance well beyond 2. In fact this is the fundamental theorem of information theory: as the size of the: given any desired distance and any desired efficiency less than 100% the percentage of codes meeting this criteria increases to 100% as the code size (size of the clump) increases. Reed Solomon codes are a particular class of codes many of which tend to be near maximal in terms of distance relative to efficiency ratios with reasonable computational complexity.
So my point is that the original poster was actually giving a better solution but was assuming more background knowledge. Hope this helps.
Reed Solomon Library and Swarmcast (Score:2)
Unfortunately the Swarmcast project has languished after 1.0, but we have started a new project called the "Open Content Network" [open-content.net]
Spare Gigs? (Score:1)
While I sit here wondering whether Moore's law will ever allow the supply to truely catch up and surpass demand, I hear a Slashdot post talking about "Spare Gigs".
Look, if you want to be dumbasses about HDD purchases and will only need 5 GB of space ever, in your life, buy a 5GB drive at some obscene seek speed, and then send
Re:Spare Gigs? (Score:1)
Re:Spare Gigs? (Score:1)
Cool, send me your old drives. (Score:1)
Seriously, I pick up everybody's old hard drives and use 'em. A windows 98 machine needs only a 528 MB disk to be a schweet network client, MacOS needs a little less.
I store all the big stuff on the network and use linux soft RAID to build big volumes out of small drives. Right now the main server has seven 9GB SCSI-3 drives in a RAID-5 configuration with a single hot spare. At one time I had 15 hard drives, though, because I had eight IDE drives and seven SCSI-2 (all in the 200-600 MB range). There's also a secondary server, used to store backups, that has 13 2.4 GB SCSI-2 drives on old ISA-bus controllers. It runs soft RAID5 also, and linux's (lame) NFS implementation but most of the time it is turned off to save power.
The down side is it tends to run hot as hell, especially with the IBM SCSI-3s - but since I started running three six-inch fans repinned from 12 to 5 volts it's reasonably cool & quiet. When I replace my furnace next month I'm going to take the gigantic blower our of the bottom and run it extremely slowly in the bottom of the rack, that will put some CFMs in the system!
I get a fair number of drives from the "technology recycling" bin the state runs out by the wastewater reclaimation plant. CD-ROM drives in the 4-12X range are easily found there too.
Corporate. (Score:2)
That's 18 gigs of wasted space on every workstation.
Re:Demand better (Score:1)
Wonder what silly patent it infringes... (Score:1)
Method and apparatus for allowing disaster recovery from loss of a file by storing it in two places at once.
Re:Mojo Jojo! (Score:1)
"Backup" you say? (Score:1, Funny)
Disaster Recovery (Score:3)
Say that one of the companies in the WTC had done this. Sure, they woulda had backups when a server blew up, but after the entire building was destroyed, they would have had nothing.
You never want to put ALL of your marbles into local backups.
Re:Disaster Recovery (Score:2)
You also need to consider that this software can _also_ provide offsite backup services far more efficiently: it knows, for example, to only make one copy of each shared file.
-Billy
I don't get it (Score:1)
What if some secretary, who has half of the companies emailed "backed up" on her computer, hoses her machine because like most office drones she's not too computer literate?
How is this secure? Fast? Efficient? I thought the whole idea of a backup was to have those tapes in a safe secure place, not on a computer that's being used by other people.
Re:I don't get it (Score:1)
So even if half the people in the office shut down their computers you could restore the data.
And there is a simple way to get around the problem you described BTW. Just have the computer techs disconnect the power button.
It's almost how IBM's ADSM Backup works (Score:2, Informative)
Clients are installed on the Hosts Enterprise Wide. These can be a mixed platform. AIX, HPUX,
Linux, Windows NT (Cough), Mainframe S/390 (VM)
and so on. The Host running ADSM server has a ton of disk space... a snapshot is taken across the
network to the ADSM server DISK from the Client filesystems to be backed up. The snapshot gets backed up to tape while the snapshot is taken of the next host.. and so on..
This works great across a fast network.
But.......
I use Amanda to backup my Linux Servers at home.
It works in almost the same manner.
Spare gigs? (Score:1)
Yes, but... (Score:2)
The idea of using a distributed/replicated data store such as MojoNation or OceanStore for backup seems cool on the surface, and from a near-term customer-acceptance standpoint it definitely has advantages, but from a long-term technical standpoint one question does arise. If you have such a data store available to you, with appropriate performance and security characteristics, why would you store stuff locally (except for cached copies, which are evanescent rather than authoritative) at all? The ultimate goal of research in this area is not to facilitate backups but to make them unnecessary; what this project is doing is really a sort of "side trip" from that goal.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2)
But I don't agree that it's a side trip; instead, it's a step on the journey. Right now we keep everything directly on the machines; next we keep the reliable copies on the network and the working copies on the machine; finally the working copies become temporary.
It's a brilliant short step.
-Billy
Re:Yes, but... (Score:1)
Spare gigs? (Score:1)
Mango Medley 97 did this 5 years ago. (before p2p) (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.mangosoft.com/news/pa/pa_0009_-_INFO
It was true Peer to Peer before it was a buzzworld. Basically it would pool space from up to 25 PCs and create an M: drive. Here's part of the article:
Mango pooling is the biggest idea we've seen since network computers
By Info World
Mango, in Westborough, Mass., is not your average software start-up. In 30 months the company has raised $30 million. Its first product, Medley97, has shipped, transparently "pooling" workgroup storage.
And someone at Mangosoft really knows the difference between features and benefits.
But it's not the benefits of Medley97 pooling that interest me. What's interesting are the features and long-term potential of Mango's underlying distributed virtual memory (DVM). Mango's pooling DVM is the biggest software idea since network computers -- perhaps since client/server -- and Microsoft had better watch out.
According to Mango, Medley97 offers transparent networking that's easy to use, fast, and reliable (not to mention secure and high fiber).
Windows users working together on a LAN can share files in a pool of their combined disk storage. Every pooled PC is both a client and server.
Go ahead and drop Medley97 into any PC you want to pool. Medley97 installs, checks configuration, and updates required Windows networking software. The product adds the PC's storage to the pool, giving you a shared, fast, and reliable network drive, M:/, which is available on all pooled PCs. For this you pay Mango less than $125 each for up to 25 PCs.
Re:Mango Medley 97 did this 5 years ago. (before p (Score:4, Interesting)
The basic premise behind the product was that when someone copied a file into the Medley drive the data pages were instantly "duplexed", meaning that a second copy of a page was made elsewhere in the network. If a node in the network went down causing only one other computer to have a copy of the page, Medley would automatically reduplex, causing the single copy of the page to be propagated to another node in the network. The basic promise of Medley was availability and fault tollerance on a P2P level.
Very cool concept but the product had a number of severe flaws that are probably obvious to the average slashdot reader.
The best thing I can say about working on Medley was that it was an opportunity right out of College to work with a number of incredibly excellent engineers on a complex and very interesting problem. Unfortunately, the idea was probably 5 to 10 years ahead of its time.
Not for Backup in Corporations (Score:1)
It might be a cute technolgy and has its use, but id never rely on it for that critical of a function. That is what san/tapes/dvd/etc are for.
Off-Site? (Score:2)
My employer uses a two SANs from Xiotech, one off-site (actually, that's still being implemented), with two off-site servers to support us should our server room spontaneously combust. All of our employees are encouraged to store any and all information on the network drives. These drives get partial backups each night MTWH (any files that changed from the previous day), and a full backup on Friday, and all the tapes are stored off-site. If a user had data s/he wished to save on the HDD and their PC is reimaged, they're SOL, and they know that from the beginning.
At the same time, each user has a 20GB or larger HDD that is essentially wasted because of this. Of course, no one in this organization could have 20GB of reports and text documents, etc.
Re:Off-Site? (Score:2)
With this system backing up every PC offsite becomes possible: you simply add a PC to the network with its own daily tape backup, and configure the Mojonation network to store one reconstruction of every unique file on it. Then drive or mail that tape every day/week to your offsite storage.
Boom -- offsite backup for the whole network, without having to backup multiple copies of the same file.
-Billy
Re:Off-Site? (Score:2)
Re:Off-Site? (Score:2)
For example, I'd say that the entire OS installation is worth a backup -- especially since you'll only have to keep one backup for the entire network (plus a few minor variations). I'd also say that any info which you would have put on the big global drive should usually be on the user's computer instead, so they don't have to contend for bandwidth when working on it (when all they want is safety).
There are already programs which can backup user desktops -- Previo works very much like what's described here, for example.
-Billy
Re:Off-Site? (Score:2)
I'm not saying this is the case in every organization, but in mine, it is the case that most data does not need to, nor should it be stored locally.
Re:Off-Site? (Score:2)
Of course. But you lose a lot with that versus the more flexible combined backup -- for example, you become unable to track changing uses, and unable to notice when something which shouldn't change does. In a combined dynamic backup, you'll notice quickly that 700 workstations have the same file (word.exe) but two of them have a different file in the same name and place. Why? Could it be a virus infection? Easy to check -- and easy to fix, once you recognise it.
And we can't allow most people to locally store their files, because most of them are accessed by more than one person.
This is a CLASSICAL example of putting the cart before the horse. The IS department isn't here to "allow" people to do things in order to make the people do their job; it's there to help them do things as they do their job. You don't FORCE the people to put files on the network in order to share; they do it because it's the easiest way. They don't need the additional motivation of having no other way to ensure a backup; they would do so without that motivation, for the reasons you specify.
Anyhow, in your original post, you spoke about backing up personal shares, which don't have anything to do with data sharing anyhow. The ONLY reason to have personal shares is to allow backups using old technology.
-Billy
fragments (Score:1)
the family tree of Mojo Nation (Score:4, Informative)
Mojo Nation was conceived by Jim McCoy and Doug Barnes in the 90's. At the end of the 90's they hired hackers and lawyers and started implementing.
Their company, Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow, Inc., opened the source code for the basic Mojo Nation node (called a "Mojo Nation Broker") under the LGPL.
During the long economic winter of 2001, Evil Geniuses ran short of money and laid off the hackers (the lawyers had already served their purpose and were gone).
One of the hackers, me, Zooko [zooko.com], and a bunch of open source hackers from around the world who had never been Evil Geniuses employees, forked the LGPL code base and produced Mnet [sourceforge.net].
Now there is a new commercial company, HiveCache [hivecache.com]. HiveCache has been founded by Jim McCoy.
BTW, if you try to use Mnet, be prepared for it not to work. Actually the CVS version [sourceforge.net] works a lot better than the old packaged versions. We would really appreciate some people compiling and testing the CVS version (it is very easy to do, at least on Unix).
It would be really good if someone would compile the win32 build. We do have one hacker who builds on win32, but we need more.
What's the patent on or how old is Hive Cache? (Score:2)
I've also seen mention in other comments that this project has been around for awhile in open source form and has only recently been corporatized. Their Sourceforge page [sourceforge.net] has been around since 2000-07-17. Is it potentially older than this as well?
Quick reponse from HiveCache (Score:2)
I will try to answer as many of the good questions and points of discussion that have been brought up as I can over the next few hours, but I wanted to shoot out a quick overview of what HiveCache is to try to set the story straight here.
First of all, HiveCache is an enterprise backup utility that uses a parasitic peer-to-peer data mesh as its backup media. Simple enough really. The goal of the software is not to replace tape or other offline backup tools, the goal is to serve as an alternative tool for users to make most file restoration requests ("hey, I accidentally deleted my Powerpoint presentation fo the big meeting that starts in 30 minutes...") a user self-help operation rather than something that needs IT assistance. Users restore most files via the p2p mesh and tape/CD-R is only needed for really old stuff or if the building burns down.
The HiveCache distributed online backup system is currently targetted at small to mid-sized enterprises (100-1000 seats) as a way for these companies to increase the ROI on existing IT investment (they already paid for the disk space, so why not use all of it) and to decrease the burden that daily backup and restore operations place upon IT staff. Right now the clients are win32 but agents that serve up disk space to these clients from OS X and Unix hosts are also available. By using good error-correction mechanisms it is possible to maintain five "nines" of reliability for retrieving any particular file even if 25% of the network drops offline. As the backup mesh grows larger reliability keeps increasing while the data storage burden for adding a new node drops (because the level of redundancy among the nodes grows.)
Lastly, the relationship between HiveCache and MojoNation. Basically, there are two branches off of the work HiveCache (nee Evil Geniuses) did on MojoNation, one early branch went on to become the backup product, a later fork pared off some of the non-essential bits (payment system, etc.) and became MNet. The MojoNation public prototype helped to work out the kinks of the data mesh but for the last year and a half of the life of MojoNation most of our internal coding effort was on behalf of this other project which shared some back-end components with the LGPL codebase we were also supporting. For those who complained earlier that the MojoNation user experience sucked I must humbly appologize, we were spending the cycles working on a different UI. Since the MojoNation project went into hibernation on our side, a former MojoNation coder and several other very sharp people have been continuing the MNet project [sourceforge.net] based upon the open codebase (and with a much nicer UI than we ever provided for MojoNation.) I do appologize if the patent and licensing language appears a bit heavy-handed, it was a cut and paste job from some email with legal counsel and will be made clearer this weekend when the site is updated.
ObPlug: We are still seeking a variety of enterprise environments for our upcoming pilot test and in addition to getting to experience the benefits of the HiveCache system for your company you will also be able to purchase the Q4 release version at OEM prices! Sign up now by sending mail to pilot@hivecache.com [mailto]
Jim McCoy HiveCache, Inc.
Re:You have spare gigs on your hard drive? (Score:1)
Why did that get a -1 score? In this discussion redundant is supposed to be a positive word.