Weekly News 2003-04-15

by

Progress

Many weeks of work culminated this past week in a historic event: all unit tests passed. This has long been a dream of many a Mnet hacker, and thanks to everyone's hard work, it is now a reality. The next step is to write a framework where the unit tests must be run before checking into the head of the tree.

Tschechow continues his relentless work by adding cache system to publishing. Soon this will allow users to quickly publish a file to a local cache, and have it pushed out over the network as time permits. This removes a large bottleneck in the publishing arena and is quite a cool new feature.

Tschechow also was hard at work on the blockstores, which now work under the _new framework. He has gotten four different backends working with the BS interface.

• Deep: which uses subdirs
• Flat: with size sorted storefiles
• Hash: which stores data in a bsddb
• Dict: a non-persistant in ram store.

• rnd: a classic random block replacement, with a small improvement in the "random" part.
• lru: a non-peristent lru replacement (great for download caches)

Finally, for those of you who don't have time to read irc all day, (What?!?!?! more important things to do than irc, that's crazy talk) there is the chump bot. Chump allows us to log usefull url's and keep notes on important discussions. It can be found at

help wanted

The Mnet Hackers are looking for some new friends. Our turn-on's include: distributed hash tables, error correcting codes, long walks on the beach, encryption, and game theory. Our turn-offs are: single points of failure, censorship, war, and faulty random number generators. There are plenty of fun tasks, and hackers commited to helping you get started, so drop on by irc.freenode.net and get started hacking Mnet.