ChrisH

Members
  • Posts

    247
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    12

Posts posted by ChrisH

  1. If you can rely on the salesmen not to change anything on the configuration side, fine. I would feel better if I had the control in my hands.

    I have a similar setup: Several internal BTSync servers, two public BTSync servers and lots of clients that should only connect to the public servers. The internal servers can only access the internet through the central firewall anyway, so it was not that hard to stop them from accepting any external BTSync connections.

     

    But if your setup works for you, by all means do it your way.

  2. Can't you do it the other way round and set the internal Windows server to only sync with the external Linux server via the known host entry and disable all other options?

    Then the salesmen can set whatever they want in their local BTSync installation and still all they can connect to is the Linux box, because the Windows box won't connect anywhere else. Use additional firewall rules on the Windows server if needed.

     

    That way YOU will have control over the critical configuration settings, not your salesmen out in the world.

  3. Inspired by http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/30920-active-distribuited-data-integrity-protection-raid-and-other-backup-obsolete/ but he explicitly stated there that this was not what he wanted:

     

    BTSync could periodically re-hash the files in the shared folders. If the current hash differs from the hash in the database, but the file change date is still the original, this indicates a corrupted file (i.e. a bit flipped somewhere in the storage subsystem). Files found corrupted should then be re-synced from any online peer, provided that their hash still matches the original.

     

    This should be a per-folder option. The re-hash interval can be configured and set quite high, like maybe once a month or so.

    Use case: Archived files that are almost exclusively read-only (photos, movies, MP3s, ISOs) but are kept on disk for months and years, thus having a bigger risk of bit rot.

     

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rot

  4. This Is not matter of this feature request.

    Then I give up.

    I like parts of what I thought you were suggesting (an active countermeasure against silent data corruption), but you just seem to want a cheap ZFS replacement for local files, which has pretty much nothing to do with what BTSync does.

    I therefore wouldn't hold high hopes for that request ever to make it into BTSync.

     

    The cheapest hardware with this characteristics cost 1200$ (core i3 on c602 mb)

    You're wrong there. My aforementioned HP Microserver runs 8 GB of ECC RAM.

  5. 1- when safety matters, never is enough.

    Okay, I'll stop discussing here. That's a killer phrase, not an argument.

     

    split peers are passive with respect other splitted peers, don't know their ip address, location etc, to rebuild a file are required n-1 parts plus the parity, splitted peers only have one single part and the parity

    That's naive thinking. If I take over a host with your PHP script running on it, I have your sync secret and can just use that to play client instead of split peer.

  6. 1. A file is corrupted if it hash was modified w/o recorded edit (the file keeps it dates - creation, last edited - unchanged).

     

    Okay, that might work.

     

    If a minimal modification is done intentionally by another than the owner, this change is detected by the hashes, allowing the owner to rebuild the file as it original status (this feature works coordinated with the other feature proposed of snapshot time machine like) . 

     

    Sorry, what? If the change was done intentionally by someone else I sync with, I want that change. I thought we were talking about bit rot. And I thought if file corruption was detected, the original should be recovered by resyncing that file, not by restoring an old version of the file from my own version archive (which also only works if the file was changed at least once since the first run).

    I already have ZFS and/or traditional backups for that.

  7. 1. "Tricks" is not what comes to my mind if the topic is safety.

     

    2. That's a completely new area (you named availability as the motivation in your first post). If you don't trust the host, don't use it or encrypt the data. If the encryption is broken or compromised (which means someone has your secret) it doesn't really matter if the data is stored all on one or distributed across many hosts. 

    Also, what's keeping the compromised host(s) from using your parity block to recover the rest of the data, provided they can't just download it from the other hosts?

    Also, if the data is interesting enough, even leaking a part of a file (think videos, or word documents) might be enough to consider the attack successful.

     

    Sorry, I see neither the benefit of PHP over native hosting nor the attack vector your proposal tries to protect against. Could you elaborate?

  8. How a client find with transmitting or asking the "private key" on the network, the corresponding public key on the tracker?

     

    there must be a function to find out the correct tracker hash passing to the "private key".

     

    and when I run a tracker, I know all available content hashes....?!

     

    Huh? You enter a secret into your client, the client hashes it and asks the network and/or the tracker server what IP(s) are linked to that hash. The algorithm to derive the hash from the secret is identical in every client. This is a one-way function, so you can't calculate the secret from the hash.

    You were talking about public and private keys, so I assumed you already knew how that works.

     

    If you run a tracker (which you can't as of now, btw) you know the hashes and the IPs, correct. You have to, otherwise tracking does not work. This has nothing to do with content.

  9. I ask me if it is possible to get foreign content?

    Yes.

     

    is it possible to bruteforce valid keys to get the content from forein persons?

    Yes, but very very very very unlikely.

     

    is there a "list" with valid keys in the web?

    No.

     

    why do not use a private and a public key

    That's essentially what it does: The BTSync tracker server has a list of hashes (the "public keys"). To connect to the server hosting the share and to decrypt the transmitted data you need the secret itself (the "private key").