Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 16:31:37 -0700 From: Wei Dai To: Ted Anderson Cc: rah@shipwright.com, Adam Back , eternity@internexus.net Subject: Re: (eternity) Namespace and robust delivery of content Message-Id: <19990419163136.A12631@eskimo.com> References: <199904180854.JAA20129@server.eternity.org> In-Reply-To: ; from Ted Anderson on Mon, Apr 19, 1999 at 09:18:57AM -0400 My views on this subject is very similar to Ted's, and I agree with most of his ideas. I also have a couple of ideas to help solve the namespace and data location problems. location server - Given a cfid, it returns a list of content servers that can deliver the referenced file. Given the hash of a public key, it returns the public key and the cfid of the file with the highest serial number among those signed with the corresponding private key. Each location server should choose a binary prefix and handle all cfids or key hashes with that prefix. Optionally, all location servers can be linked together by a broadcast network, so each content server only has to make one location submission to the network per file. meta-location server - Given a cfid or key hash, it returns a list of location servers that handles the cfid or key hash. With these servers in place, it would be easy to find the location of any file given its cfid. Namespace lookups could also be done using the normal content delivery mechanism, by retrieving the latest directory signed with the owner's key. This buys you robustness at the cost of losing synchronicity, but the loss of synchronicity can be mitigated by including timing information (e.g. expiration date) in the signed directory. It can at least be used as a backup mechanism in case the directory owner or his lookup service goes offline.