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MojoNation ... Corporate Backup Tool?
zebziggle writes "I've been watching the Mojo Nation project off and on over the last couple of years. Very cool concept. While taking a look at the site recently. They've morphed into Hive Cache a P2P corporate backup solution. Actually, it sounds like a great way to use those spare gigs on the hd."
I'd like to know how this fits in with Data Protection legislation (eg UK DPA).
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
Looks to me like they've also morphed from being a GPL package to a commercial one, with no mention of source code, but several emntions of patents on the web page.
Companies feel the need to pay for something so when everything goes tits up they have someone to blame - also, companies have credibility... entrust all my corporate data to a package written by x distributed geeks - er, no thanks.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
P2P falls into two categories nowadays, file sharing (FastTrack/Kazaa, Gnutella/Gnucleus-Shareaza-Limewire-Bearshare, Edonkey2000) or publishing (Freenet and Mnet/Mojonation). Like Freenet, Mojonation was more of a publishing network - users publish data, it gets broken into little chunks, encrypted, and then sent out to other computers, and you receive other people's encrypted chunks on your computer making you a "block server". Content trackers and Publication trackers kept track of the meta-data and where the blocks were, and metatrackers kept track of where the trackers (also called brokers) were. I chatted with zooko, one of the developers, on IRC, he was cool and the ideas were very interesting. Like many dot-com stories, it was ahead of it's time in many ways. They converted Mojonation to the open source MNet , whose CVS tree you can peruse. A lot of it is in Python, a language I do not know.
The wasted disk space on workstations (and servers) is something thought about by many, especially in large organizations with large networks. My last company began implementing SANs, so that less disk space would be wasted, and the centralization of disk space allowed for greater redundancy and easier backup. They also ran low priority (nice'd) distributed.net processes across the whole network on non-production machines. You can take a guess about how large the network is by seeing that they're still ranked #22 without submitting any keys for a year.
Gee, what knee-jerk response. It's so cookie cutter, that if I was a moderator, I might mark it as a troll. The simple fact is that "HiveCache" (the company/organization) IS "MojoNation" (the company/organization) and that "MojoNation" (the software and concept) was primarily the work of the (company/organization/founder and employees). So, as copyright owner, and creator, they can commercialize whatever they wish. Even if there was outside help fixing bugs and such, the base concept and technique was implemented by MojoNation (the organization.)
As far as patents go... well, according to even posts here, this was a rather unique approach to a p2p program. However, it HELPS to actually wait to see (or research) the patent before you actually go trying to dispute it or find prior art refuting it. This isn't one-click-of-your-mouse, you know. Not to mention, they haven't threatened to go after anything, I'd say they were even supporting the LGPL fork.
As it states.. "the patent-pending technology of MojoNation" click on the "MojoNation" hive-hex and you will find all the links and relevant information. (Or at least the fact that some of it will be available soon.) So, yes, you are misunderstanding.
Are you interested in taking away the ability of an OSS (and P2P) contributing company to defend their ideas (and work, and money) from corporate interests that might be interested in stealing their ideas? [No arguments from those of you interested in dismantling the patent system entirely -- I feel that way sometimes, too; we're talking level playing field right now.]
The way I see it, you don't need to backup multiple copies of the entire data set to provide redundancy.
Instead, you do what RAID 5 does, you stripe the data, across multiple peers, with a checksum block on another. This way your data is still safe if one of your peers goes down. More clever striping and checksum algorithms can cope with more than one peer going down, up to some limit.
If a large number of your peers go down at once, then your data is lost, but that is only likely to happen if something catastrophic happens, such as your office building burning down, or being hit by a tornado. In that case it would be time to turn to your of site backups, as no P2P backup strategy would be of any use.
It is worth remembering that the whole point of this system, is to get people back to work as fast as possible, if they accidentally loose a relatively small amount of data. It is designed to complement, not replace, an offsite tape backup strategy.
I hope this helps.
I remember reading an Infoworld article about a software package that does the very same thing, back in 1997. On a whim I was able to find the quoted article at (don't forget to remove the space):
W or ld_-_Mango_pooling.asp
... for the rest goto the URL.
http://www.mangosoft.com/news/pa/pa_0009_-_INFO
It was true Peer to Peer before it was a buzzworld. Basically it would pool space from up to 25 PCs and create an M: drive. Here's part of the article:
Mango pooling is the biggest idea we've seen since network computers
By Info World
Mango, in Westborough, Mass., is not your average software start-up. In 30 months the company has raised $30 million. Its first product, Medley97, has shipped, transparently "pooling" workgroup storage.
And someone at Mangosoft really knows the difference between features and benefits.
But it's not the benefits of Medley97 pooling that interest me. What's interesting are the features and long-term potential of Mango's underlying distributed virtual memory (DVM). Mango's pooling DVM is the biggest software idea since network computers -- perhaps since client/server -- and Microsoft had better watch out.
According to Mango, Medley97 offers transparent networking that's easy to use, fast, and reliable (not to mention secure and high fiber).
Windows users working together on a LAN can share files in a pool of their combined disk storage. Every pooled PC is both a client and server.
Go ahead and drop Medley97 into any PC you want to pool. Medley97 installs, checks configuration, and updates required Windows networking software. The product adds the PC's storage to the pool, giving you a shared, fast, and reliable network drive, M:/, which is available on all pooled PCs. For this you pay Mango less than $125 each for up to 25 PCs.
The basic premise behind the product was that when someone copied a file into the Medley drive the data pages were instantly "duplexed", meaning that a second copy of a page was made elsewhere in the network. If a node in the network went down causing only one other computer to have a copy of the page, Medley would automatically reduplex, causing the single copy of the page to be propagated to another node in the network. The basic promise of Medley was availability and fault tollerance on a P2P level.
Very cool concept but the product had a number of severe flaws that are probably obvious to the average slashdot reader.
The best thing I can say about working on Medley was that it was an opportunity right out of College to work with a number of incredibly excellent engineers on a complex and very interesting problem. Unfortunately, the idea was probably 5 to 10 years ahead of its time.