Packet Juggling - Floating Data Storage

Filthmaster writes "I just saw an interesting paper that has been posted to bugtraq, full-disclosure and vulnwatch. It deals with the principles of stealthily using network infrastructure as either short-term or long-term storage. Not sure if I'm ready to implement it, but it makes interesting food for thought." There's also a mirror up.

Comments

Already there

[Rogerborg]

When our network fileserver fills up (as it does twice a week or so), I start emailing things to myself through the corporate mail server. When the mail server fills up, I start adding to my intranet HTTP pages. When all else fails, I start sending (encrypted) data back to myself via my ISPs external mail servers.

It would of course be far better for the company if they just sprang for some new drives in the fileserver, but engineer and bandwidth costs don't appear as capital expenses, so they are viewed as being effectively "free". Sigh.

Provisioned storage within the Internet

[FastDownload]

While the authors try to use existing protocols to simulate temporary storage in the Internet, we are working on a scalable, shared storage resource that is open to the community.

We currently have over 20 TB of storage around the world available in the public Logistical Networking Testbed and other groups have another 10-20 TB provisioned in private use testbeds.

In additon to storage, we are also working on providing simple computational services at the storage nodes (work on the data in place while it is stored rather than moving it to computation centers).

For more info, visit the LoCI Lab at http://loci.cs.utk.edu.

Main problem with this is...

[zen parse]

Not everyone can benefit, because of side effects of it's parasitic nature.

The amount of storage this system gives in the text would be total available for ALL users of the system. More users, less avaiable storage.

Parasites can do better when there little competition from other parasites, but if the system get's infested, the host it lives of may die. Or someone may develop a cure.

Either way, after a certain threshold, the more popular any system using this gets, the less useful it would be.

Just some random thoughts I had when I was talking about a similar idea with someone.

The BOFH was there already

[red_dragon]

It was 1997 when Simon the BOFH wrote about such a contraption, which won him the IT Idiot Award for Least Intelligent Supervisor.

... This year I've decided to sell the boss on using the network as a storage medium. I casually drop a couple of remarks until the boss decides to channel his massive intelligence away from tying his shoelaces and onto the matter at hand.

"It's simplicity itself!" I cry "We've got these Gigabit Ethernet switches all around the place that we just aren't using! Instead of letting them go to waste we could be sending data continuously around them until it's needed which would actually cut down on the amount of physical disk storage we would need! And just think of the time we would save with read and write latency when the data's already on the net!"
...

Re:Huh? Let it fail FFS

[Rogerborg]

No, but I use the network fileserver and one of the lunix boxen to perform builds. If it runs out of space, I can't build. My short term solution is to clear up space by sending myself enough of my own data to make room on the main fileserver.

I never said that it made sense, just that I'm doing it.

Of course, it would make more sense for the users with GB of data to get rid of some of it, or for the admin to implement quotas. But those users tend not to be the ones with customer deliberables, and, hey, it turns out that the sysadmin gets paid the same regardless of whether we can work or not. So in practice, it's the people with actual deliverables that have to sort out the problems.

The best solution of all would be for one of us to complain to management. That would be great, because whoever did it would be surplussed in short order, and the rest of us could have their disk space!