A lot of time has passed, and a lot of code has been written. Bazil is still in heavy development, but it has reached a good milestone to blog about: it can synchronize changes from one peer to another.
Warning: at this stage in development, we will put no effort into compatibility of file formats or protocols. Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
What follows is a walkthrough of scenario where we have two computers sharing files – find me at GopherCon for a live demo, or follow the steps and run it yourself.
First, make sure you have a working Go (>=1.4) installation. You are expected to have basic familiarity with Go, at this point in development.
Unfortunately, to work around a missing gRPC feature, we need a custom branch of it for now. Let's check that out:
$ go get google.golang.org/grpc
$ cd $GOPATH/src/google.golang.org/grpc
$ git remote add bazil https://github.com/bazil/grpc-go
$ git fetch bazil
$ git checkout -b auth bazil/auth
And then install Bazil itself:
$ go get bazil.org/bazil
For the rest, we'll assume you have two computers, virtual machines or containers that will talk to each other.
You can also run the steps on one host, by calling passing the bazil -data-dir=PATH
option as appropriate to keep two separate state
directories.
We'll call our two environments black
and white
, and differentiate
them with that hostname in the prompt.
white$ bazil create
black$ bazil create
To introduce the peers to each other, we need to pass their public keys to each other. As the current code doesn't actually keep track of any nicknames or aliases for peers, we'll need to refer to these public keys a lot. Let's set shell variables to remember them.
To see the public key of a node, run
white$ bazil debug pubkey
Typically, debug commands access the database directly, and will only work if the server is not running.
Now set the variable $BLACK
on the host white
with the value being
the public key of black
, and vice versa. If you're running the two
on the same host, the following will work; if not, copy-pasting with
the mouse is needed.
white$ BLACK="$(bazil -data-dir=path/to/datadir/of/black debug pubkey)"
black$ WHITE="$(bazil -data-dir=path/to/datadir/of/white debug pubkey)"
As is probably obvious from the debug
in the command name, this is
not the final UX for this.
Bazil has a (per-user) server component that the command-line
utilities communicate with. Let's start the server on white
.
white$ bazil server run &
bazil: Listening on [::]:34211
black$ bazil server run &
bazil: Listening on [::]:nnnnn
We believe in the value of encryption. Bazil uses convergent encryption with sharing keys where the people who know the relevant sharing key can have access to the data.
The default installation sets up one sharing key, but let's make a new
one for our shared files; it's just 32 bytes of random data. We'll
name our new sharing key friends
.
white$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=sekrit bs=32 count=1
white$ bazil sharing add friends <sekrit
Let's create a volume using the new sharing key, and mount it.
white$ bazil volume create -sharing=friends myfiles
white$ mkdir mnt
white$ bazil volume mount myfiles mnt
We now have an encrypted, deduplicating, snapshottable, local file
system. Let's share it with black
, using the public key stored in
$BLACK
from earlier.
We introduce a new peer, identified by the public key stored in
$BLACK
. We tell white
to allow black
to access its local
content-addressed storage, and
the myfiles
volume we just created.
white$ bazil peer add $BLACK
white$ bazil peer storage allow $BLACK local
white$ bazil peer volume allow $BLACK myfiles
Let's tell black
to use the new volume. First, we introduce the
white
as a new peer for black
, and giving the network location
where the server on white
is listening on. The server prefers the
port 34211 (bazil, do you see it?), but will use any free port. We
saw the port output earlier.
black$ bazil peer add $WHITE
black$ bazil peer location set $WHITE 192.0.2.42:34211
Later, we'll introduce more rendezvous mechanisms, including multicast DNS and an internet-wide lookup based on the public key, and mechanisms for working behind NATs.
black
needs to know the sharing key from earlier. Copy the sekrit
file from white
to black
through whatever means are appropriate,
and then run
black$ bazil sharing add friends <sekrit
black$ bazil volume connect -sharing=friends $WHITE myfiles
black$ bazil volume storage add -sharing=friends myfiles peerkey:$WHITE
black$ mkdir mnt
black$ bazil volume mount myfiles mnt
We now have the save volume mounted on two machines.
Let's make changes on white
and observe them on black
.
white$ echo hello, world >mnt/greeting
black$ bazil volume sync myfiles $WHITE
black$ ls mnt
black$ cat mnt/greeting
white$ echo hello, again >mnt/greeting
black$ bazil volume sync myfiles $WHITE
black$ cat mnt/greeting
Hey! It works!
The sync implementation doesn't currently handle deletions or subdirectories.
There is currently no user interface to resolve conflicts, or to finish sync merges that were postponed because a file was still open.
At this stage in development, we will put no effort into compatibility of file formats or protocols.
After the obvious missing functionality mentioned is done, there's plenty of work to be done on making the user experience of managing peers better. The steps above are very manual and discrete right now, as that is what's easiest to debug.
Once the common usage scenarios have been explored, more convenient mechanisms can be added on top of these low-level steps, e.g. bootstrapping a peer connection over ssh, and interacting with friends over im with humans copy-pasting short messages.
To learn more about the why of Bazil, read the introductory blog post.
To understand the architecture of Bazil better, browse the documentation https://bazil.org/doc/ .
Bazil is still at an early stage in development, but the future looks really exciting. We'd love to have you participating.
posted on 2015-07-07, tagged as bazil
GopherCon is here, and it is time to reveal what Bazil is all about.
Bazil, also known as bazil.org/bazil
, is a file system that lets
your data reside where it is most convenient for it to reside.
Bazil is still under heavy development, but welcomes developers and curious power users. Here's a little teaser of what's coming.
Imagine you have
On the desktop, you naturally want to be able to use the whole 3TB disk. And you're not always using the desktop, even when you're home – the sofa is just so comfortable. You'd like to work with your files even when you're on the laptop.
So you install the currently fashionable large-corporate-backed cloud-sync solution.
A file sync based solution will try to copy all of your files from the desktop to the laptop – yet the laptop's smaller SSD just can't hold that much! You're forced to play games with picking-and-choosing what folders get synchronized, and just don't have the convenience of grabbing that 8-year-old wedding photo on a whim.
To modernize an aphorism, you can't put ten terabytes of files on a 500 GB SSD. Syncing between very disproportionate systems is fundamentally a problematic design, and is best for a small hand-picked set of files, not as an actual storage solution.
Don't take this the wrong way; you really should have some sort of remote backups for important data, in case the building burns down. S3 RRS/Glacier, Google Cloud Storage DRA seem very promising for backup cold storage; we'll come back to that later.
Rocking it old school? We're down with that.
A network file system like CIFS or NFS, or something like sshfs
,
would let you use the files from the desktop on the laptop – but your
wifi will never be as fast as the laptop's local SSD, in either
bandwidth or latency, so now all your file accesses are crawling, and
you end up hunting for an ethernet cable whenever you need to transfer
something bigger.
To speed things up, you end up copying often used files to the SSD. Now you have several copies of the same files, and no idea what was modified when, or whether you're looking at the last copy, or whether it's safe to delete to free up space on the cramped laptop.
A network file system will also require for you to stay within wifi range. For travel, you're once again reduced to up manually copying files around, and once again lose track of where's the latest copy of what file.
However, this leaves you installing & configuring cloud backup software in addition to your network file system woes; not the simplest ordeal, and don't expect any kind of file history browsing / recovery integration for you network file system clients.
or
You can choose to back up to your own disks – with the same caveats as aboveor
All of the bad parts of the computer in the closet, with the extra of needing to fiddle with the disks and remember things.Bazil separates knowledge of a file from the contents of the file, letting the laptop know about all of the files, without having to store the contents of the file.
With Bazil, the laptop SSD contents act as
And because Bazil keeps track of the changes, it can also keep track of changes and synchronize them between the different peers; no more confusion about what copy is the latest.
You try to read a file where the contents are not locally stored, the data will be fetched from desktop or cloud/closet server, whichever happens to be the fastest way. All the data is accessible even if it won't fit on the SSD.
You can pin files for travel, so you're no longer tied to your home network, or even any network connectivity.
Bazil is the archival solution, with the snapshot feature. Every Bazil peer can browse the earlier snapshots, making restoring files easy no matter what computer you're on. You don't have to manage both a network file system and a backup solution.
Bazil is the redundancy solution, with copies of file contents
stored on multiple computers. The CAS stores
immutable, write-once objects, so you can even mitigate software bugs
by taking an extra copy of the history with just rsync
, file system
snapshots, or any other file copy tool. A snapshot is just an object,
and refers to other objects; the objects contain everything needed to
regain access to your files.
All Bazil file storage can be encrypted to guarantee your privacy, whether in the cloud, on your own computers, or on external hard drives. Encryption is on by default.
Bazil is still under heavy development, and a lot of the functionality hinted at above is still not quite there. We welcome developers and curious power users.
See the documentation for more, and feel free to ask questions on the mailing list or Twitter @BazilFS.
The original gopher image was made by Renee French.
posted on 2014-04-24, tagged as bazil project announce
Tv is talking about the Bazil FUSE library at the local Gopher meetup tonight. Check out the slides.
posted on 2013-06-10, tagged as fuse talk
Hi. This blog post establishes the Bazil.org project. This is not an April Fool's joke.
There are more ambituous things floating in the background, but many people have expressed interest in this, so here's an early release: a Go FUSE filesystem programming library.
This is based on Russ Cox‘s fuse library, as hosted at https://code.google.com/p/rsc/source/browse/#hg%2Ffuse
Here's how to get going:
go get bazil.org/fuse
The github repository is at https://github.com/bazil/fuse
posted on 2013-04-01, tagged as fuse announce