DistOS-2011W Wuala

Introduction

Most modern computers are connected to each other via the internet. This interconnectivity provides an age of instant communication and information sharing. This same connectivity should protect users form file loss as the user's files should live within the internet. If the files live in the internet they should be available from any computer a user deign's to sit at. There are now abundant online services that help provide to online backup and merging. However these system's all provide a central authority that allows access and provides the storage itself. I prefer the concept of a service ran between peers where I give up space on my local system and in turn I receive safe distributed and redundant online storage. In my search I found a system like this Wuala. In this paper I explore the technology behind Wuala and it's relative viability.

End with a paragraph outlining the rest of the document.<ref> A. S. Tanenbaum, Distributed Operating Systems. Prentice Hall, 1995.</ref>

Previous Work/Alternative Solutions

In the area of online/distributed storage there are a number of existing works. The can be seperated into two main divisions; distributed file systems and service oriented systems.

Distributed file systems include academic offerings such as OpenAFS (Andrew File System), OceanStore, Ceph and the commercially driven GFS( Google File System ) and it's open source implementation HFS(Hadoop File System). The weaknesses and strengths and viability of these solutions have been examined thoroughly in class and I won't rehash those discussions here.

The other division of solutions can be visualized as a small two dimensional matrix with one axis consisting of open source and closed and the second axis being divided into backup only and backup and sync. The number of closed source options is exceptionally high including SugarSync, Syncplicity, SpiderOak, BOX.Net, Tonido, Unilium, BackBlaze, Mozy, Carbonite, UbuntuOne, Wuala and the prolific of the bunch Dropbox. On the open source side there is Cyber Duck, iFolder, RubyDrop, and SparkleShare. Neither of these lists are exhaustive but both provide a large portion of the well known offerings.

Common to almost all of these offerings is that storage is centralized. Some of the corporations behind the closed source solutions run their own data centres but, most rely on the storage services of current cloud providers. The exceptions are RubyDrop and SparkleShare both of which rely on GIT which is a distributed version control system. Unluckily neither are ready for general use and are still in the early stages of development. In contrast Wuala is a working system that uses the storage of participants machines for it's storage requirements.

System Description

Describe the systems individually here - their key properties, etc. Use subsections to describe different implementations if you wish. Briefly explain why you made the selections you did.

Experiences/Comparison (multiple sections)

In multiple sections, describe what you learned.

Discussion

What was interesting? What was surprising? Here you can go out on tangents relating to your work

Conclusion

Summarize the report, point to future work.

References

<ref> Gromilund Dominik, Meisser Luzius, Schmid Stefan, Wattenhofer Roger. ~2004. Crytree: A Folder Tree Structure for Cryptographic File Systems. Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory, ETH Zurich. http://dcg.ethz.ch/publications/srds06.pdf</ref>

<references/> Give references in proper form (not just URLs if possible, give dates of access).