So a number of people have requested a "state of Freenet" address, so here we go:
0.4 is working well surprisingly well despite a number of serious outstanding bugs. The Windows installer is working beautifully, and the Linux installer, while kludgy, works very well too. My personal experience has been that after installing a fresh node most if not all Freesites can be reached (and those that cannot are probably not being inserted). The most noticable problem is the datastore corruption bug that was identified quite a while ago. The main reason that it hasn't been fixed yet is that Tavin has been rewriting the datastore code from the ground up which should fix the code - making it pointless for anyone else to work on it (Scott was going to delve into it a few weeks back). Unfortunately this seems to be taking longer than was expected and communication with Tavin is sporadic at best. If Tavin is listening perhaps he could give a progress report. My feeling is that once the datastore corruption bug is fixed, we should do a release of 0.5. Oskar believes that there are still other bugs however doing a wider release will help us to track down and eliminate these bugs (which, despite administering several Freenet nodes on both Linux and Windows, I have never seen). We would obviously document them as known bugs with the release. One of the most amazing things I have seen is third-party clients such as Frost (http://jtcfrost.sf.net/) which allow messages to be sent through Freenet, much like Usenet, and which works extremely well, in fact, the Frost message boards are busier than these mailing lists at the moment! I suggest everyone checks it out. Another piece of impressive work is David McNab's Freeweb and FCPTools suite of software. These are now the definitive site insertion tools for Linux and Windows. Gianni has been working on integrating "Forward Error Correction" into Fproxy which should dramatically increase the reliability of large file retrieval from Freenet. One area that needs work is the mechanism for obtaining seednodes. The ideal situation is a database which passively gathers node addresses from a number of secret nodes, and gives them out at random via a HTTP request (or perhaps even via Freenet itself for additional security). This would require the addition of a couple of new FCP commands (one for dumping a list of reliable noderefs from the datastore, another for allowing a node to test the reliability of a noderef), and the creation of some simple PHP with a database back-end (Freenet now has a database on SourceForge which is currently being used for the Wiki pages but which could also be used for this). Obviously the best solution is for people to obtain seednodes through out-of-band means, but we must also provide an easier option, and this would be the most secure. If anyone wants to undertake this, or one of the two parts of this (FCP work, or PHP work) - please let me know. Back to mailing lists, things are quite quiet right now, but for some reason the months before Christmas have always seen a lull in development, I am not sure why, perhaps something to do with academic terms, or perhaps people need to recover from the busy summer months. Don't worry though, one thing that was apparent from the O'Reilly P2P conference last week was that there is just as much interest in Freenet as there ever was, if not more. On that subject, I guess I should give a quick report on the conference. It was smaller than the first P2P conference, but surprisingly well attended given the economic climate. Oskar, Scott, Brandon Wiley, Steven Hazel, and Gianni were there. The Freenet community meeting was just attended by 8 or 9 people, but did boast one guy who had flown over from London JUST for the community meeting! We did our best to make it worth his while by bringing him out to some nice bar in Washington. Scott and Oskar also gave their presentation on attacking P2P networks, which was very well attended and I think they did a great job. Hopefully they will put the material up on a webpage somewhere for people to look at. All in all, the conference was good fun, even though the projects which are considered P2P have little in common technically in many cases, they do seem to attract some very smart and interesting people. So, in conclusion, things are going very well, if a bit quiet right now. There are just one or two sticking points which should be resolved any time now, and despite these the network *is* working. -- Ian Clarke ian at freenetproject.org Founder & Coordinator, The Freenet Project http://freenetproject.org/ Chief Technology Officer, Uprizer Inc. http://www.uprizer.com/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20011111/3ca7c06c/attachment.pgp>
