On Tue, 14 Sep 1999, Julian Assange wrote:

> > What are you using to distribute the network disk?
> 
> tcp initially. however I'm investigating various udp multicast
> solutions for redundancy and speed on local networks.
> 
> In writing my cryptographic file system, marutukku, I developed a
> fast scatter-gather userland block device. Initially this was simply
> to kick all of the crypto-bloat out of the kernel, and ease debugging
> of the crypto-code. However I always had the view that one day this
> code would become useful for allowing remote network access to
> encrypted blocks on another machine via a low-weight
> block-request/block-write network protocol. Authentication is a
> non-issue as only the cipher text ever passes over the network
> (because the blocks are encrypted/decrypted only on the client).
> But it seems to me this code is also incredibly useful for rapidly
> proto-typing a conventional distributed block device also.
> 
> One of the benefits of a distributed block device is that it's very easy
> to grow. However if our file-systems can not grow, there is little point.

I asked as Linux has a Network Block Driver, which one of my coworkers
ported to the Linux kernel (it had been only userland). As it's not GPL'd,
we were looking at making an in-kernel NetBSD driver. :-)

Take care,

Bill