[mnet-devel] Hack day: my plan

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

amichrisde at yahoo.de asked a bunch of questions of icepick, but I'm replying with my own answers.

> Chord eh.  I that your favorite DHT topology?

I don't have a favorite at the moment.  Chord is an excellent choice for 
experimentation.

> I have one gripe about them: since request only go
> one way around the ring you cann't know if the guy that's making you do work is doing work for
> anyone, since he isn't doing any for you.

Yes, that's an interesting issue.  "Bidirectionality", as the Kademlia paper calls it.

> I've got this strange picture in my head of a sloppy
> two way Chord where nodes maintain have random connections distributed to the other nodes in the
> ring based on 1/<hash distance>.

So the idea of a "flexible" Chord with links existing in a certain 
distribution rather than being fixed at specific intervals is separable from 
bidirectionality, isn't it?

One could have normal traditional inflexible Chord, but just change it so that 
you can route in either direction.  Then it would be bidirectional Chord.  Did 
I miss anything?

Here is a paper about a flexible Chordish-like thing.  It requires the links 
to conform to a certain probability distribution:

"Symphony: Distributed Hashing In A Small World"
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/568921.html

and here is a paper which infuriatingly mentions that a flexible variant of 
Chord would work fine without giving any citation or explanation of how it 
would work.  It has a footnote that says something like "P2P researchers all 
agree that a flexible variant of Chord would work fine.".

"The Impact of DHT Routing Geometry on Resilience and Proximity"
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gummadi/papers/p1101-gummadi.pdf

> Someone on the list mentioned that MNet will eventually move to a DHT.  What's the plan?

At the moment I'm thinking that v0.7 looks kind of useful already, so maybe 
v0.7 should be released to the public before we switch to the disruptive DHT.

> What do you do with all the content trackers?  How do you implement a search engine in a DHT?

Mnet Record Keeper design doc
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/mnet/mnet_new/doc/record_keeper.html?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/html

mailing list: "open issues in record keeper design"
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2844317&forum_id=7702

mailing list: "open issues in record keeper, part 2: encryption"
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2844318&forum_id=7702

mailing list: "open issue in record keeper, part 3: efficiency"
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2844319&forum_id=7702

mailing list: "open issues in record keeper, part 4: public records"
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2844320&forum_id=7702

mailing list: "open issues in record keeper, part 5: load balancing"
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2844321&forum_id=7702
   
> Getting a fixed topology where the bad guys are spread evenly throughout is a big goal for
> anonymity and for DHTs, since cancer nodes can otherwise wipe out specific material.

I don't really like that kind of approach.  It doesn't seem very feasible, and 
I think that a friend-net kind of approach should be much safer as well as 
more feasible.

> I think I've got a way to make a network do this.  Has anyone seen any other good projects that
> try to do this?  Or does anyone have any good ideas.

I'm interested in your idea!

> Have fun at Hack Day.  What side of the planet are you having it on?

It's a planet-wide hack day!  We primarily use IRC for coordination:

server: irc.freenode.net, channel: #mnet

Hack Day is on Sunday, so our Jewish hackers can participate.  I don't know if 
any of our Muslim hackers will participate in this one, since it is Ramadan.

--Z



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