HomePage RecentChanges

2007-02-19

David; Would you prefer to have some of the “mirroring” discussions contained in this environment? If so, I would be prepared to work here since it does support TransClusion at a level that is acceptable to me. – HansWobbe

Yes, let’s discuss the “Community:DistributedEditing” system here. We can always move discussions elsewhere if we find (or build) a better place. – DavidCary

name

What to call this system? (We might want to buy the associated Domain Name).

related systems that don't quite do everything I want

In a comment to "Trying Dreamhost for Backup", Mathew Newton 2007 mentions “It seems to me that there a loads of home users running their own 24/7 servers at home nowadays … and with this comes the common desire for robust backups. As mentioned above it soon occurs to many that offsite is the (only) way to go. Hence, it strikes me that one of the best (and cheapest) solutions to all of this is to set up reciprocal backup arrangements between yourself and someone else in the same boat …”

"Mount Strongspace to a folder in Ubuntu"

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContinuousBackups seems like exactly what I want. Well, other than the fact that it hasn’t been implemented yet.

Wikipedia:Tandem_Computers built custom hardware designed to be fault-tolerant. I suspect that (with a bit of programming) we could build a fault-tolerant wiki on top of (modern) off-the-shelf computers (and the internet) without modification. Or is there something I missed?

"Consumerium ... plans to cascade data between three wikis". Why “three” exactly?

ideas

(later I need to sort out “goals”, “nice things to have”, from “how to test that its working” and “possible ways to implement it”).

The basic idea here is “I know any one hard drive will fail after an average of 5 years. And any one web site will eventually go offline because of power loss or other causes (fire, flood, etc.). How do I access my files after such an event occurs?”.

I am most interested in building a “fault tolerant wiki”, but these 2 kinds of “distributed data store” are so very similar … in fact, I’m not sure whether it’s better to build the wiki on top of a distributed data store, or build a distributed data store on top of the distributed wiki.

When I say “no one can delete a file”, I mean that a perfect copy of the that version of the file can immediately be recovered from some other server, no matter which server gets hit by a “potential dataloss event” such as:

Possible implementations of a distributed wiki:

Where does the software sit?

Testability: Backup software: How do I know it’s really working? Have you heard the scary stories about tape drives with broken heads that only recorded zeros – but no one discovered that fact until a hard drive failed and they needed to restore that data?

failure modes

"Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?" by Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson. “Unfortunately, many aspects of disk failures in real systems are not well understood, probably because the owners of such systems are reluctant to release failure data or do not gather such data.” “The work in this paper is part of a broader research agenda with the long-term goal of providing a better understanding of failures in IT systems”

Is there any reason not to gather and release data on disk failures in the distributed wiki?

The fact that a particular node has gone offline will be obvious. What other data should we collect to put that fact in context? Perhaps: * manufacturer and model number of the drive; * whether the drive is stand-alone or inside some sort of RAID array; * temperature at time of failure; … * What exactly failed: hard drive, power supply, motherboard, CPU, memory, or what ?

Ideally, we would gather enough data to help us make decisions that improve reliability without increasing costs. But not so much data that the cost of collecting the data outweighs any possible benefit.

meta conversation

… soon most of this page will be moved to a page with a more descriptive name, perhaps [[fault_tolerant_wiki?]] or distributed wiki

EditNearLinks: LionKimbro HansWobbe TransClusion SamRose MattisManzel BrandonCsSanders