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."

Comments

Interesting, but ...

[King Of Chat]

I'd like to know how this fits in with Data Protection legislation (eg UK DPA).

Re:Interesting, but ...

[Albanach]

Am I missing something? This is jsut a backup - why would that present a problem under the DPA. You update the databse and the backup is corrected as it is updated, just as would happen in any enterprise situation.

Do you mean unrestricted access? I don't think this is talking about using Joe Foo's kaaza shared folder to store your company's backup data - it's using unused disk space on the company network, and the web sites states that the backup mesh is encrypted, so unauthorised users may have the file on their disk, but they can't access it.

Looks to me like all the criterea of the DPA are covered.

GPL?

[Albanach]

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.

Re:Fundamentally flawed

[twoshortplanks]

From the website

As an enterprise IT network grows the amount of redundant data stored on PCs increases significantly. Most PCs have the same applications and OS files, HiveCache takes advantage of this fact to decrease the amount of distributed storage needed for the backup network. By not requiring hundreds of redundant copies of the same MS Word executable and Windows DLL files found on each enterprise PC to be stored multiple times, the HiveCache backup mesh requires only a fraction of the data storage space that would be required by an equivalent tape backup solution.

In other words, in a coperate enviroment it only backs up each file once - meaning only different files you have on each machine - i.e. the data files and configuration files - need be backed up after the first machine is backed up.

Mojonation and backups

[br00tus]

One of the exciting things about p2p are the innovations people come up with. Of course, some innovations are braindead, though take awhile to implement - someone suggested hashing for p2p (Gnutella) in the first thread in which Gnutella was discussed on Slashdot, but it's taken over two years for the major Gnutella developers to implement it.

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.

Re:Mango Medley 97 did this 5 years ago. (before p

[harshaw]

Yup, I worked at Mango several years ago on the Medley product.
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 product ran as a driver in Windows 95/98 and NT. Debugging Medley was an absolute atrocity; I remember at one point having as many as 8 windbg windows open attempting to debug some network wide crash problem.
• Another problem was that in rare cases a crash on a single machine could bring down other machines in the network. Doh!
• Servers are cheap, disk is cheap. Once the IT administrator realizes that there is significant complexity in maintaining a Medley network, he or she would realize that it is probably cheaper to buy a RAID enabled server with a ton of disk space.
• Marketing. Mango couldn't market this product to save themselves. At one point we used a rather rotund Male model called "Waldo" to push the product. Very bizarre.... the product was so complex that it took a while for technical people to understand let alone the average user.
• The 1.0 product was pushed out the door before it was ready.
• The company couldn't figure out the appropriate distribution chanel; Vars, direct retail, direct sales, etc. Nothing seemed to work.
• Finally, the product was over-engineered (sorry guys!)

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.