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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.
Won't everyone pinging their gigabytes of data back and forth totally screw the net, a la slammer?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
If it were quick enough and timed well enough, could network bounced packets be enough for some really quick swapped out swap space? gig ethernet gets around 1ms to my next machine, and thats 10 times quicker than my hard drive (10ms access time) so if I could store swap in that space, would that work?
I was thinking of tunneling ssh over sms before this, but that sounds just silly now.
Why use your own network when you can..
6seryoeyEe O.ot..>u&6eOyeUWrong loader, giving up...f1Afaef1UDf efPAMSfIr f=PAMSu e }eoACfuuEu1E1OeIr*uu uuAUfayyfAafafayyfaI1UIeS1AOA6Ee PAQuo1AOA6YoIrutEe A1AuoEe O1A AuIr!AOEe A
First you give it comms, then unlimited CPU and now distributed memory.
Can Skynet be far behind...
A: Oh, I'm just storing data temporarily.
Seriously, the idea is interesting, but I doubt that many network operators will like the extra network load. It would be interesting to build a SAN in this manner, just for academic's sake ;-)
Oh, and the example with Microsoft's exchange servers made me chuckle. Finally a reliable storage "medium" from Microsoft! Go figure :)
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.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
Download Linux ISOs in 5 minutes using LoRS Tools available at http://loci.cs.utk.edu
... in which complete computer memories worked like this: those were called mercury delay line memories, in which pressure waves in mercury lines basically held information.
The UNIVAC I had such an 18-channel memory. More information can be found here, here, and here.
These channels could hold a whopping kilobit!
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
Just burn a CD a day and post it to a non-existant address on the other side of the world. That way you can probably keep a terabyte of data int he air without taking any space in your office, and, unlike TCP/IP, you may be able to reuse the wrappers.
Virtually serving coffee
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.
Did anyone else read this as Pocket Juggling?
--Muzz
You could make a shorter loop by posting the letters to yourself, and increase the packet size (DVD). But these are the kind of trivial implementational issues that are always thrown up by late-adopters in the face of a paradigm shift. If your office gets hit by lightning, chances are that your 40GB HD is a gonner, whereas in my system all your data will still be safe, providing the fire brigade let you put up a provisional post box.
Virtually serving coffee
There's never anything new...in electronics lab in college in the 60's I built a delay line memory, which was nothing more than a very large coil of wire and some rather simple circuity that would shove bit's into one end and 'catch' them out the other side and recirculate them. You used timing to specify the addresss and could read or update as the bit came by. Another variation that was commercially used on this used a column of mercury and cycling sound waves...see http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/mak-UNIVAC-I-delay- line.doc
which to my mind refers to:It could just be my mind - just fell down in the bath and hit my head falling over the edge...
|>>?
Didn't the BOFH convince the Boss that you could store data on the network cables, causing him to order quite a few spools of the stuff?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Whilte it's good to see people exercising their minds like this, it's also good to keep in mind that some things should not be regarded as more than just exercises.
With this particular scheme, the inherent complexity (needing interfaces to all of these common network protocols) and the risks (there must be a billion ways to lose data this way) basically mean that storage according to this scheme would be really high.
Disproportionate storage costs per unit data automatically means no real-world application outside of brain exercising.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
It was 1997 when Simon the BOFH wrote about such a contraption, which won him the IT Idiot Award for Least Intelligent Supervisor.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
When I was in college back in the Good Old Days (tm) of the Internet, I had a friend who sometimes stored files "in transit", so to speak, by emailing them to himself with explicit routing in the To address. He would send the message on a long circuit of several machines around the country and he had a script to automatically reforward them once they got back if he didn't save them within a certain period of time. Back in the day you could do this by setting the To address to something like "@hostone.com,@hosttwo.com,me@myhost.com" (see RFC 821 sec 3.6) and since the network and the machines on it were much slower in those days, if you added enough hosts then you could introduce a significant delay and have lots of files stored in transit (actually, on the various mail servers) even though your own disk quota was nearly used.
Explicit routing is long gone, but it is an interesting early manifestation of the same principle: the network is my hard drive.
I remember that when I was at the University, I explained to someone that with satellites at 37000 km from us, information took a quarter of a second to go there and back to earth. So if you use a 500 Mbps link, you can store 15 MBytes of data in the distance between, on an absolutely zero cost medium, during 0.25 second. And if you were confident enough in the reliability, you could even put a bouncer on earth, which goal would only be to resend the stream to the satellite and keep it looping. You would have 15 Mbytes of free storage with an average access time of 125ms (250ms max). Although absolutely useless, that would be as fun as TCP/IP over pigeon routing :-)
Willy
I will never put a sig.
How does using a scarce resource (bandwidth) to create an abundant resource (disk space) make any economic sense?
Headline: How to turn gold into copper! News at 11.
Or I could upgrade my internet connection to get the same amount of storage in other locations. In about three months the extra required capacity on the internet connection would have cost me as much as the harddisk. If I buy the harddisk now, in three months I will still have storage without having to keep paying. Besides, the harddisk is going to be more efficient and probably also more reliable.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
...but I just love bringing up the fact that I'd thought up something similar, like, 4 years ago now, and every time my memory's jogged about it here on Slashdot, I like to post about it. Instead of hijacking existing services, however, I did create a new one, where a basically packets were flung from one machine to another (or many) around and around again -- each machine held on to a number of packets, but didn't keep them for too long. All traffic was encrypted, and no machine knew 1) where a packet started and 2) where a packet ended up, it just kept flinging packets around.
The main goal of the service was to create a nice, neat, encrypted, secure messaging system where neither the origin or destination of a particular message could be detected, such that even if a message was intercepted and decoded, you still didn't know where it came from or where it was going. (This was envisioned about 2 days after the early reports of Carnivore.)
One of the nice side effects, however, is that you could use the service to basically store a message "on-the-wire" damn near indefinately, broken apart into tiny packets, distributed more or less randomly to every other participating host, with those hosts having absolutely no clue what it was, who put it there, or who's going to retrieve it.
The bandwidth usage was, in two words, potentially catastrophic. It could really hork a network. I mean, really, REALLY hork a network.
It was kinda cool. God only knows where that paper is today, though -- I removed it from the web about 2 years back when the Justice Department was considering considering such papers, ideas, services, devices as potential aids to terrorism, and fining/imprisoning the bright young minds who come up with such stuff. So, until either our government stops playing the "T" card, our citizens calm down, and/or we eradicate the likes of Hammas, Islamic Jihad, the IRA, the ELF, and many other like groups, I doubt I'll ever make it available again. *shrug*
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
There's also a mirror up.
Sneaky bastards!
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
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!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It's also interesting that way back in the dawn of computing equipment they did use propagation delay as a way of doing storage. Mercury delay lines in particular. Not only that, the people that used them noticed that the tubes made noise and found ways to play tunes by saving the appropriate data. Google "mercury delay lines" and you'll find a few notes about the technology.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com