Version 5 of DRF

Updated 2006-07-18 13:23:18

Darel Finkbeiner [email protected]

Had to use three letters due to Donal Fellows.. :)


Outline for Distributed Blog. Sting

Concept: Someone over at one of the conservative blog sites mentioned the "ridiculousness" of a blog being taken down by DDoS. The idea immediately sprang to mind, how about a P2P type system? One where the blog is "mirrored" on lots of other "servers". And people just get the blog feed from the nearest most reliable source...

This presents some issues that have nothing to do with the technical hurdles. Mostly with traffic counting. Since many of the larger blogs generate revenue through traffic, distributing the blog in this fashion would take that away.

However, such a system could be designed as a "backup". Distribute the blog in this manner, and allow the feed part to be turned on or off by the owner of a blog. That way, if the blog goes down, they just send an email, the program picks it up and says, "Oh, I need to turn on the feed for blog X. Let me notify any partners I can see." It then forwards the email to any addresses that it knows about, which tells them to activate. (This part would need some smarts, since you wouldn't want to duplicate... a simple flag to check if the feed is on at a certain peer before sending the message)

1) The blogger would have to send the email of new posts to one of the nodes in the network even when the main site is up. That way the transition is seemless.

2) There needs to be a reasonable limit on the archive length of an individual blog so as not to crash the peer. This can be as simple as a configuration setting in the peer software giving a number of maximum posts.

3) Use GnuPG or some other OpenPGP system for signing the emails. In order to set up a blog on the network, you would need to add the public key of that blogger and any other blogger that posts for it. (There are group blogs) Assign each key ID to a blog name in the peer. This is a simple solution, and solves many of the authentication difficulties in one fell swoop. In fact, you never have to worry about where a post comes from or where it is going, only that the signature is valid and that the key matches a blog that you have set up on the peer network.

Work Flow -

Main blog goes down. Attack, outage, whatever. Blogger emails the PGP signed activation request to any peer in the network a) Email to a drop off mailbox that is polled by the peer, or b) Email directly to the peer if it has that capability Sting receives, verifies, stores, and adds to the internal feed. HTTP request either from a user or an aggregator a) Directly to Sting if it has httpd, or b) Through an (apache) proxy httpd Main blog comes back up - Request dump of posts - Email the PGP signed deactivation request to any peer


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