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.
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.
Added metadata to the bucket store, which is used to hold the share number
(but the bucket doesn't know that, it just gets a string).
Modified the codec interfaces a bit.
Try to pass around URIs to/from download/upload instead of verifierids.
URI format is still in flux.
Change the current (primitive) file encoder to use a ReplicatingEncoder
because it provides ICodecEncoder. We will be moving to the (less primitive)
file encoder (currently in allmydata.encode_new) eventually, but for now
this change lets us test out PyRS or zooko's upcoming C-based RS codec in
something larger than a single unit test. This primitive file encoder only
uses a single segment, and has no merkle trees.
Also added allmydata.util.deferredutil for a DeferredList wrapper that
errbacks (but only when all component Deferreds have fired) if there were
any errors, which unfortunately is not a behavior available from the standard
DeferredList.
