Is it possible to mount Tahoe-LAFS as a file system? If it is, then it's exactly what I'm looking for.
Edit: Also, can you say "this group of nodes count's as a single location" for failure protection? So if I have two locations where I store servers and then 10 other one off data collection locations can I say "I want you to treat these datacenters as one node since they are very likely to fail together if they fail".
I read the FAQ and this is apperently an asked question! I'm not surprised because I think many people are thinking of doing the type of thing I want to do.
Here it is directly from the Q&A...
" Q12: If I had 3 locations each with 5 storage nodes, could I configure the grid to ensure a file is written to each location so that I could handle all servers at a particular location going down? "
" A: Not directly. We have a wiki page and some tickets (linked from the wiki page) about this but it's deeper than it looks and we haven't come to a conclusion on how to build it.
The current system will try to distribute the shares as widely as possible, using a different pseudo-random permutation for each file, but it is completely unaware of server properties like "location". If you have more free servers than shares, it will only put one share on any given server, but you might wind up with more shares in one location than the others.
For example, if you have 15 servers in three locations A:1/2/3/4/5, B:6/7/8/9/10, C:11/12/13/14/15, and use the default 3-of-10 encoding, your worst case is winding up with shares on 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10, and not use location C at all. The most likely case is that you'll wind up with 3 or 4 shares in each location, but there's nothing in the system to enforce that: it's just shuffling all the servers into a ring, starting at 0, and assigning shares to servers around and around the ring until all the shares have a home.
The possible distributions of shares into locations (A, B, C) are:
Edit: Also, can you say "this group of nodes count's as a single location" for failure protection? So if I have two locations where I store servers and then 10 other one off data collection locations can I say "I want you to treat these datacenters as one node since they are very likely to fail together if they fail".