Re: Proposal of a new hidden wiki

["Josh McFarlane" <josh.mcfarlane@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/9/07, Ringo Kamens <2600denver@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I just googled for raid over network, but I didn't find anything so
> maybe I made it up? How about a
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network? This still wouldn't
> fix the problem of a server "going to the dark side" but it would
> probably be a bit more practical. I have heard of YaCy which is a
> distributed search engine and I think there's at least one active node
> indexing tor. Is there any program like YaCy that would generate link
> directories?
> Comrade Ringo Kamens

The problem with a SAN is that it is a central storage site. Give a
server write access and if they get compromised the entire Wiki would
be gone.

What if we set up some sort of communication system that 'informed'
the other wiki sites on the access list to changes made? Then, if a
site is compromised, all the transactions posted to it simply post to
the other wiki's and can be rolled back, and no one has direct control
over the other wiki mirrors. If a wiki owner thinks a site has been
compromised, they can simply remove the site from their list of
approved wiki-mirrors.

YaCy works differently than what we want. They distribute their
results across multiple machines, and do not mirror the data. What we
are aiming to achieve is a service that appears to be one wiki but is
indeed interconnected across many machines, each with it's own copy
but changes are reflected across the entire set. This way, if one
machine dies it does not affect service at all. If we do the YaCy
method, if one machine is compromised, whatever data hashed to that
server is lost forever.

I really think any solution that we want to implement needs to have a
mirror-based setup with each individual host (or groups of hosts) able
to provide the entire wiki on it's own.

-- 
Thanks,
Josh McFarlane
http://www.joshmcfarlane.com