By writing something like "25 75 100" into a file named 'encoding_parameters'
in the central Introducer's base directory, all clients which use that
introducer will be advised to use 25-out-of-100 encoding for files (i.e.
100 shares will be produced, 25 are required to reconstruct, and the upload
process will be happy if it can find homes for at least 75 shares). The
default values are "3 7 10". For small meshes, the defaults are probably
good, but for larger ones it may be appropriate to increase the number of
shares.
This will make it easier to change RIBucketWriter in the future to reduce the wire
protocol to just open/write(offset,data)/close, and do all the structuring on the
client end. The ultimate goal is to store each bucket in a single file, to reduce
the considerable filesystem-quantization/inode overhead on the storage servers.
The only SHA-1 hash that remains is used in the permutation of nodeids,
where we need to decide if we care about performance or long-term security.
I suspect that we could use a much weaker hash (and faster) hash for
this purpose. In the long run, we'll be doing thousands of such hashes
for each file uploaded or downloaded (one per known peer).
This (compatibility-breaking) change moves much of the validation data and
encoding parameters out of the URI and into the so-called "thingA" block
(which will get a better name as soon as we find one we're comfortable with).
The URI retains the "storage_index" (a generalized term for the role that
we're currently using the verifierid for, the unique index for each file
that gets used by storage servers to decide which shares to return), the
decryption key, the needed_shares/total_shares counts (since they affect
peer selection), and the hash of the thingA block.
This shortens the URI and lets us add more kinds of validation data without
growing the URI (like plaintext merkle trees, to enable strong incremental
plaintext validation), at the cost of maybe 150 bytes of alacrity. Each
storage server holds an identical copy of the thingA block.
This is an incompatible change: new messages have been added to the storage
server interface, and the URI format has changed drastically.
