Farsite
Overview
Federated, Available, and Reliable Storage for an Incompletely Trusted Environment
Farsite is a serverless, distributed file system that does not assume mutual trust among the client computers on which it runs. Logically, the system functions as a central file server, but physically, there is no central server machine. Instead, a group of desktop client computers collaboratively establish a virtual file server that can be accessed by any of the clients.
The system provides a global name space for files, location-transparent access to both private files and shared public files, and improved reliability relative to storing files on a desktop workstation. It does this by distributing multiple encrypted replicas of each file among a set of client machines. Files are referenced through a hierarchical directory structure that is maintained by a distributed directory service.
Our broad objective is to figure out how to build highly available, reliable, and secure systems on a substrate of cooperating but mutually distrusting hosts. In the context of our distributed file system, we have identified three specific goals:
- To provide high availability and reliability for file storage.
- To provide security and resistance to Byzantine threats.
- To have the system automatically configure and tune itself adaptively.
Publications
- William J. Bolosky, John R. Douceur, and Jon Howell, The Farsite project: a retrospective, in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 41 (2), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2007
- John R. Douceur and Jon Howell, Distributed directory service in the farsite file system, in Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), USENIX, November 2006
- Jacob R. Lorch, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, and Jon Howell, The SMART way to migrate replicated stateful services, in Proceedings of the 2006 EuroSys Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., Leuven, Belgium, April 2006
- John R. Douceur and Jon Howell, Byzantine fault isolation in the Farsite distributed file system, in Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS), 2006
- John Douceur and Jon Howell, Black Box Leases, no. MSR-TR-2005-120, September 2005
- Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, and Jacob Lorch, Load Management in a Large-Scale Decentralized File System, no. MSR-TR-2004-60, July 2004
- John Douceur and Jon Howell, Scalable Byzantine-Fault-Quantifying Clock Synchronization, no. MSR-TR-2003-67, October 2003
- John R. Douceur, Atul Adya, Josh Benaloh, William J. Bolosky, and Gideon Yuval, A Secure Directory Service based on Exclusive Encryption, in Proceedings of the 18th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., December 2002
- Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Miguel Castro, Gerald Cermak, Ronnie Chaiken, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, Jacob R. Lorch, Marvin Theimer, and Roger P. Wattenhofer, FARSITE: Federated, available, and reliable storage for an incompletely trusted environment, in Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), USENIX, Boston, MA, December 2002
- John R. Douceur, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Daniel R. Simon, and Marvin Theimer, Reclaiming Space from Duplicate Files in a Serverless Distributed File System, no. MSR-TR-2002-30, July 2002
- John R. Douceur, Atul Adya, William J. Bolosky, Dan Simon, and Marvin Theimer, Reclaiming Space from Duplicate Files in a Serverless Distributed File System, in Proceedings of 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 2002
- John R. Douceur, The Sybil Attack, in Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS), 2002
- Atul Adya, Jon Howell, Marvin Theimer, William J. Bolosky, and John R. Douceur, Cooperative Task Management without Manual Stack Management, in Proceedings of USENIX 2002 Annual Technical Conference, USENIX, 2002
- John Douceur and Roger Wattenhofer, Modeling Replica Placement in a Distributed File System: Narrowing the Gap between Analysis and Simulation, no. MSR-TR-2001-62, August 2001
- John Douceur and Roger Wattenhofer, Competitive Hill-Climbing Strategies for Replica Placement in a Distributed File System, no. MSR-TR-2001-60, June 2001
- John R. Douceur and Roger P. Wattenhofer, Competitive Hill-Climbing Strategies for Replica Placement in a Distributed File System, in Proceedings of 15th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), Springer-Verlag, 2001
- John R. Douceur and Roger P. Wattenhofer, Modeling Replica Placement in a Distributed File System: Narrowing the Gap between Analysis and Simulation, in Proceedings of 9th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), Springer-Verlag, 2001
- John R. Douceur and Roger P. Wattenhofer, Optimizing File Availability in a Secure Serverless Distributed File System, in Proceedings of 20th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 2001
- John R. Douceur and Roger P. Wattenhofer, Large-Scale Simulation of Replica Placement Algorithms for a Serverless Distributed File System, in Proceedings of 9th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., 2001
- William J. Bolosky, John R. Douceur, David Ely, and Marvin Theimer, Feasibility of a Serverless Distributed File System Deployed on an Existing Set of Desktop PCs, in Proceedings of the international conference on measurement and modeling of computer systems (SIGMETRICS), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2000
