Rocket Tech Tahoe
Tahoe-LAFS is a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, distributed
data store and distributed file system first released in 2007.
The continues to be developed by those at leastauthority.com.
The project is open source, and anyone can build their own grid.
It's truly an amazing project, allowing dozens or hundreds of users to
pool their storage together into a single, secure, highly-available storage grid.
Years back, there was a public test grid available. We've stood up our
own Rocket Tech grid for public testing. Give it a shot. If you use storage
on the grid, please consider running a storage node to give back.
Rocket Tech Grid Stats
Storage nodes online: 0
Total disk: 0 GB
Disk used: 0 GB
Disk free: 0 GB
Our Test Folder
(read-only link)
Client-side encryption
When you upload a file to Tahoe-LAFS, the client first encrypts the file,
then splits it into pieces, then distributes those pieces to available
storage nodes. Storage nodes have no way of knowing what files are
stored on them, unless you share the URI (including encryption key)
with the storage node owner.
Fault Tolerance
Tahoe-LAFS employs an M-of-N erasure coding algorithm. This allows
each client to specify that their files should be split into N pieces,
of which any M pieces must be retrieved to reconstruct the file. A typical
setting for the Rocket Tech grid is 4-of-5 encoding. This breaks files
into 5 pieces, stored on 5 different storage nodes, and 4 of those pieces
must be retrieved to download the file from the grid.
An erasure coded file will consume N / M bytes on the grid. In the above
example, a 100 MB file encoded as 4-of-5 would consume 100 MB * 5/4 = 125 MB
on the grid. The file would remain available if any one storage node dropped
offline. Other values, such as 3-of-5, 2-of-5, 3-of-7, etc. can be used for
various levels of fault tolerance. The tradeoff is always grid space for redundancy.
Garbage Collection
Due to the anonymous nature of Tahoe-LAFS storage, storage nodes do not know
whether fileparts stored are still in use or abandoned. Garbage collection is
accomplished by purging older fileparts from each storage node. The age threshold
is currently set to 6 months on Rocket Tech storage nodes.
To avoid file deletion, the user must periodically run a 'renew leases' process
on their files. This can be accomplished recursively at a directory level by using
the 'deep check, renew leases' option from the web interface or command line.
Renewed fileparts are tagged with the current date and given another
6 months until deletion
Illicit Content Protection
While storage servers do not know and cannot reconstruct files they store, it
is possible for storage nodes to blacklist specific filecap FURLs. If illicit
content is discovered on our grid, please send the filecap/FURL to
info/at/rocket-tech/dot/net, and we will validate and blacklist it.
Introducer
The introducer node(s) keep track of which storage servers are online and
keep the clients updated with this list.
The introducer FURL for the Rocket Tech grid is:
pb://6o5e6opue5fqx456y73ecnjr22lnnktx@tcp:tahoe-introducer.rocket-tech.net:80/cazgj4ptfbwb32gbe6hrrcitpaaq6r3s