8 ms·

Introducing the Infinit file system

212 points by urza 10y ago

sigmonsays 10y ago
my bandwidth kills things like this. I have so little upload in the US that I can't host anything and still have a usable network connection
- chockablock 10y ago
  If upload interferes with download, you may be experiencing bufferbloat. http://www.dslreports.com/faq/17883 http://www.dslreports.com/faq/17883
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  You could get a virtual machine somewhere cheap for $5-10/month and use that as your canonical storage reference.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Reply to myself since I cannot edit: Depending on how much storage you need, it might be cheaper to get a dedicated server or colo your own versus getting a virtual machine. Feel free to reply if you have questions on this.
    - DecoPerson 10y ago
      Any advice on getting either of those in Australia for less than an arm and a leg?
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        Start here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com.au/forumdisplay.php?f=36 http://www.webhostingtalk.com.au/forumdisplay.php?f=36
      - viraptor 10y ago
        I don't know about colos, but https://www.vultr.com/ https://www.vultr.com/ has presence in Sydney. They offer both VMs and block storage at reasonable prices.
      - cyphar 10y ago
        Move to a building that has the NBN. ;)
      - fapjacks 10y ago
        Ramnode has a bunch of locations and is hands-down the best VPS provider I've ever used, and I've used literally hundreds over the last fifteen or so years. The vast majority are a flash in the pan, and very few actually don't suck. Ramnode has always been super solid for me, and very reasonably priced. Take every other recommendation with a grain of salt. VPS is one of those industries that attracts the scummiest human beings on the planet.
acd 10y ago
Thanks for creating Infinit! I think its great that you have end user usability in mind when building the filesystem.
TheIronYuppie 10y ago
Really cool! Do you know how it compares to the research project Farsite from Microsoft? http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/showpage.aspx?page=/en-us/projects/farsite/ http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/showpage.aspx?page... Sounds really similar (but productized).
Filligree 10y ago
Really cool, but I use NixOS for everything. You mentioned it's open source so--want to help me package it? It's probably not very hard.
- ccrone 10y ago
  It's not open source just yet. We want to open it in a responsible way (i.e.: not a massive code dump) so it will take a bit of time. You can post a request for packages here in the meantime if you would like: http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com
meesterdude 10y ago
This looks awesome! I can't find anything in the docs on data resiliency - if i add a storage node and it later becomes unavailable, is data distributed across other nodes? how many nodes can fail?
- haarts 10y ago
  The roadmap seems to suggest at least some of your questions are answered: https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap
- cadeuh 10y ago
  Hey, it all depends on the replication factor you set when creating your infrastructure. If you have 3 nodes, a replication factor of 2 and one of the node used for storing data becomes unavailable, then data will be distributed to the third node for example. Feel free to join our Slack channel to chat with us directly!
lootsauce 10y ago
Looks cool but I get a bad gateway error when I try to set up an account :-(
- cadeuh 10y ago
  Hey! Can you send us an email at contact@infinit.sh so we can have a look? We fixed an issue similar to this just a few hours ago, so it might be working now.
deprave 10y ago
This looks really great and I love the direction. Hopefully they're working on making it more consumer-friendly. ;) Questions: 1. They say that "While most solutions (Dropbox, GlusterFS, OwnCloud etc.) store your files unprotected in the cloud or on a specific server, we took a diametrically opposed direction by relying heavily on encryption. Whenever a file is stored in Infinit, it is cut into chunks, every chunk is encrypted with a unique key (AES-256) and stored, providing both encryption at rest and in transit." Isn't that actually a lot like Dropbox? (https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/27 https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/27) 2. How stable is FUSE for OS X? Last time I used it (couple of years) was for SSHFS and it was unstable and crashed the machine every now and then.
- philjohn 10y ago
  Dropbox deduplicate content ... so a file that several people have uploaded is only actually stored once. They also allow you to access your files over a web interface, and no decryption happens "in browser". So yes, DropBox most certainly have the decryption keys. Your data is protected at rest, and on the wire using TLS, but it's not end-to-end encryption.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Do you have any reference to their de-duplication system?
    - michaelmior 10y ago
      There is a blog post[0] which references deduplication. But apparently this may have been disabled[1]. [0] https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/07/changes-to-our-policies/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/07/changes-to-our-pol... [1] http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/54633/does-dropbox-no-longer-de-duplicate-files-across-users http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/54633/does-dropbo...
- hlieberman 10y ago
  I think the big difference they're implying (though I haven't been able to actually /verify/ the implication yet) is that Dropbox holds the keys to decrypt that content. Infinit doesn't.
bicatali 10y ago
onedata.org is another one of these unified file view used in science.
matreyes 10y ago
Looks great! Is there any option to do some Map Reduce jobs on Infinit ?
tingol 10y ago
Is there any information on how good it works in the real world by people who have used it?
- wazoox 10y ago
  Works well from the limited experimentations I've made. Very well documented, nice, professional job overall.
kefka 10y ago
1. Protocol level filesystems featured by a company (single point of failure) 2. Uses existing services in ways those other companies may not like. (Serf in someone else's walled garden) 3. Closed-source, with maybe promises of open sourcing later 4. Hard to search, given the name is -e from a real word 5. Relies on extensive network bandwidth, especially in cases upload is scarce To think of a few.... As converse, I'm looking at IPFS. It works great, now.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  IPFS serves a totally different purpose and can't be used in any reasonable way to achive what Infinit seems to be doing.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - bfung 10y ago
    Can you elaborate, please? My initial reaction was the same as grandparent post - maybe IPFS doesn't have all the security things stated up front, but these things seem similar.
    - rakoo 10y ago
      2 differences: * infinit provides a virtual filesystem that you can use with any other application. At the moment IPFS only has helpers and an api * infinit's goal is to use the existing infrastructure (your disk, your S3 account, your google drive account, ...) to form a big drive. IPFS lives in its own world, which is great when everybody uses IPFS, but we're not there (yet ?)
      - kefka 10y ago
        "ipfs mount" is certainly a command, and it mounts the ipfs filesystem over /ipfs and /ipns . And I've already used those in conjunction with programs. The ipfs mount directive has been there since 0.3.1 I don't view smearing your data across multiple fragile services to be a "feature". Worse yet, if any of those companies believe you're breaking ToS, you're out of luck. Whereas ipfs does live in its own world, it integrates well with our workflows. And http://ipfs.io http://ipfs.io runs a public ipfs gateway, so that anyone can resolve data from the network without running the peer software.
fiatjaf 10y ago
See also: https://bazil.org/ https://bazil.org/, https://git-annex.branchable.com/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/
mitchty 10y ago
Thought this looked familiar, this is from February and they still have the source as "coming soon (tm)". So until that coming soon becomes released I'm not really all that bothered by this thing.
- gkya 10y ago
  It's 2nd may today man.
  - mitchty 10y ago
    Sure, still doesn't give me any hope as to when/if it will get released.
disposeofnick9 10y ago
How would this be better/different than https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs ?
- cookrn 10y ago
  Here is their comparison with Tahoe: https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs If you flip on the "Compare" switch there, the two differences it shows are: 1) Infinit is redundant using replication while Tahoe uses erasure codes 2) Infinit supports heterogenous storage backends, while Tahoe is homogenous
cookrn 10y ago
Note: Infinit is not yet OSS. They plan to open-source the code, but have not yet done so: https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues/1 https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues/1
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jcoffland 10y ago
This sound really cool but I will wait until it is fully Open-Source and I can build it myself.
- yashinm92 10y ago
  I did create something similar a while back: https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-server https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-server https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-client https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-client
WorldMaker 10y ago
This seems like an interesting project to watch and I'd be interested more in it as A) Windows support gets better, and B) source is opened. I'm definitely comparing to my usage of BitTorrent Sync today. I see in the FAQ a comparison for BT Sync a few things of interest. BT Sync does have a more filesystem-like mode. (It's a part of BT Sync "Pro", if that makes a differences.) It's also scalable to available resources, although some of that through manual management of which devices are connected to a BT Sync share and which have which copies of which files. Also, BT Sync Pro does support At-Rest security with some management. A UX for encrypted shares was added in recent versions of the software and it supported through some command line effort in previous versions. I've seen tutorials for setting up BT Sync "know nothing peers" on, for instance, EC2 storing encrypted blocks to S3.

212 points by urza 10y ago

my bandwidth kills things like this. I have so little upload in the US that I can't host anything and still have a usable network connection

chockablock 10y ago
If upload interferes with download, you may be experiencing bufferbloat. http://www.dslreports.com/faq/17883 http://www.dslreports.com/faq/17883
toomuchtodo 10y ago
You could get a virtual machine somewhere cheap for $5-10/month and use that as your canonical storage reference.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Reply to myself since I cannot edit: Depending on how much storage you need, it might be cheaper to get a dedicated server or colo your own versus getting a virtual machine. Feel free to reply if you have questions on this.
  - DecoPerson 10y ago
    Any advice on getting either of those in Australia for less than an arm and a leg?
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Start here: http://www.webhostingtalk.com.au/forumdisplay.php?f=36 http://www.webhostingtalk.com.au/forumdisplay.php?f=36
    - viraptor 10y ago
      I don't know about colos, but https://www.vultr.com/ https://www.vultr.com/ has presence in Sydney. They offer both VMs and block storage at reasonable prices.
    - cyphar 10y ago
      Move to a building that has the NBN. ;)
    - fapjacks 10y ago
      Ramnode has a bunch of locations and is hands-down the best VPS provider I've ever used, and I've used literally hundreds over the last fifteen or so years. The vast majority are a flash in the pan, and very few actually don't suck. Ramnode has always been super solid for me, and very reasonably priced. Take every other recommendation with a grain of salt. VPS is one of those industries that attracts the scummiest human beings on the planet.

acd 10y ago

Thanks for creating Infinit! I think its great that you have end user usability in mind when building the filesystem.

TheIronYuppie 10y ago

Really cool! Do you know how it compares to the research project Farsite from Microsoft? http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/showpage.aspx?page=/en-us/projects/farsite/ http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/showpage.aspx?page... Sounds really similar (but productized).

Filligree 10y ago

Really cool, but I use NixOS for everything. You mentioned it's open source so--want to help me package it? It's probably not very hard.

ccrone 10y ago
It's not open source just yet. We want to open it in a responsible way (i.e.: not a massive code dump) so it will take a bit of time. You can post a request for packages here in the meantime if you would like: http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com

meesterdude 10y ago

This looks awesome! I can't find anything in the docs on data resiliency - if i add a storage node and it later becomes unavailable, is data distributed across other nodes? how many nodes can fail?

haarts 10y ago
The roadmap seems to suggest at least some of your questions are answered: https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap
cadeuh 10y ago
Hey, it all depends on the replication factor you set when creating your infrastructure. If you have 3 nodes, a replication factor of 2 and one of the node used for storing data becomes unavailable, then data will be distributed to the third node for example. Feel free to join our Slack channel to chat with us directly!

lootsauce 10y ago

Looks cool but I get a bad gateway error when I try to set up an account :-(

cadeuh 10y ago
Hey! Can you send us an email at contact@infinit.sh so we can have a look? We fixed an issue similar to this just a few hours ago, so it might be working now.

deprave 10y ago

This looks really great and I love the direction. Hopefully they're working on making it more consumer-friendly. ;) Questions: 1. They say that "While most solutions (Dropbox, GlusterFS, OwnCloud etc.) store your files unprotected in the cloud or on a specific server, we took a diametrically opposed direction by relying heavily on encryption. Whenever a file is stored in Infinit, it is cut into chunks, every chunk is encrypted with a unique key (AES-256) and stored, providing both encryption at rest and in transit." Isn't that actually a lot like Dropbox? (https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/27 https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/27) 2. How stable is FUSE for OS X? Last time I used it (couple of years) was for SSHFS and it was unstable and crashed the machine every now and then.

philjohn 10y ago
Dropbox deduplicate content ... so a file that several people have uploaded is only actually stored once. They also allow you to access your files over a web interface, and no decryption happens "in browser". So yes, DropBox most certainly have the decryption keys. Your data is protected at rest, and on the wire using TLS, but it's not end-to-end encryption.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Do you have any reference to their de-duplication system?
  - michaelmior 10y ago
    There is a blog post[0] which references deduplication. But apparently this may have been disabled[1]. [0] https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/07/changes-to-our-policies/ https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/07/changes-to-our-pol... [1] http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/54633/does-dropbox-no-longer-de-duplicate-files-across-users http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/54633/does-dropbo...
hlieberman 10y ago
I think the big difference they're implying (though I haven't been able to actually /verify/ the implication yet) is that Dropbox holds the keys to decrypt that content. Infinit doesn't.

bicatali 10y ago

onedata.org is another one of these unified file view used in science.

matreyes 10y ago

Looks great! Is there any option to do some Map Reduce jobs on Infinit ?

tingol 10y ago

Is there any information on how good it works in the real world by people who have used it?

wazoox 10y ago
Works well from the limited experimentations I've made. Very well documented, nice, professional job overall.

kefka 10y ago

1. Protocol level filesystems featured by a company (single point of failure) 2. Uses existing services in ways those other companies may not like. (Serf in someone else's walled garden) 3. Closed-source, with maybe promises of open sourcing later 4. Hard to search, given the name is -e from a real word 5. Relies on extensive network bandwidth, especially in cases upload is scarce To think of a few.... As converse, I'm looking at IPFS. It works great, now.

fiatjaf 10y ago
IPFS serves a totally different purpose and can't be used in any reasonable way to achive what Infinit seems to be doing.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bfung 10y ago
  Can you elaborate, please? My initial reaction was the same as grandparent post - maybe IPFS doesn't have all the security things stated up front, but these things seem similar.
  - rakoo 10y ago
    2 differences: * infinit provides a virtual filesystem that you can use with any other application. At the moment IPFS only has helpers and an api * infinit's goal is to use the existing infrastructure (your disk, your S3 account, your google drive account, ...) to form a big drive. IPFS lives in its own world, which is great when everybody uses IPFS, but we're not there (yet ?)
    - kefka 10y ago
      "ipfs mount" is certainly a command, and it mounts the ipfs filesystem over /ipfs and /ipns . And I've already used those in conjunction with programs. The ipfs mount directive has been there since 0.3.1 I don't view smearing your data across multiple fragile services to be a "feature". Worse yet, if any of those companies believe you're breaking ToS, you're out of luck. Whereas ipfs does live in its own world, it integrates well with our workflows. And http://ipfs.io http://ipfs.io runs a public ipfs gateway, so that anyone can resolve data from the network without running the peer software.

fiatjaf 10y ago

See also: https://bazil.org/ https://bazil.org/, https://git-annex.branchable.com/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/

mitchty 10y ago

Thought this looked familiar, this is from February and they still have the source as "coming soon (tm)". So until that coming soon becomes released I'm not really all that bothered by this thing.

gkya 10y ago
It's 2nd may today man.
- mitchty 10y ago
  Sure, still doesn't give me any hope as to when/if it will get released.

disposeofnick9 10y ago

How would this be better/different than https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs ?

cookrn 10y ago
Here is their comparison with Tahoe: https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs If you flip on the "Compare" switch there, the two differences it shows are: 1) Infinit is redundant using replication while Tahoe uses erasure codes 2) Infinit supports heterogenous storage backends, while Tahoe is homogenous

cookrn 10y ago

Note: Infinit is not yet OSS. They plan to open-source the code, but have not yet done so: https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues/1 https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues/1

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jcoffland 10y ago

This sound really cool but I will wait until it is fully Open-Source and I can build it myself.

yashinm92 10y ago
I did create something similar a while back: https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-server https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-server https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-client https://github.com/sp3ctr3/arcanum-client

WorldMaker 10y ago

This seems like an interesting project to watch and I'd be interested more in it as A) Windows support gets better, and B) source is opened. I'm definitely comparing to my usage of BitTorrent Sync today. I see in the FAQ a comparison for BT Sync a few things of interest. BT Sync does have a more filesystem-like mode. (It's a part of BT Sync "Pro", if that makes a differences.) It's also scalable to available resources, although some of that through manual management of which devices are connected to a BT Sync share and which have which copies of which files. Also, BT Sync Pro does support At-Rest security with some management. A UX for encrypted shares was added in recent versions of the software and it supported through some command line effort in previous versions. I've seen tutorials for setting up BT Sync "know nothing peers" on, for instance, EC2 storing encrypted blocks to S3.