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مدونات يوجد بداخلها معلومات وأراء شخصية من أعضاء GRN حول العالم

When God tells Berkley to develop the tool you need...

David Miller - Friday 23 May 2008

Last night I walked the dog. Nothing very earth shattering about that, except that while I was walking the dog I started thinking about what we needed to solve the problem of replicating audio files between Temecula and Sydney and other centres around the world.

While some centres have reasonable Intenet connectivity, even in the USA & Australia we would be looking at some costs to have sufficient bandwidth to move files around across the Internet. Many centres only have dialup, and some don't have that. So we need to be able to do much of the replication by disk - good ol' Sneaker Net.

So while I was walking, God gave me a design, and as I wrote up that design I realised that we needed a replication layer that relied on a transport layer which didn't require nodes to be connected to the Internet. 

So I started Googling all sorts of related things. Replicating filesystems, sneakernet etc. Today I struck Gold. Platinum even!

It turns out that our problem is common to people in developing countries and NASA. And a few military folk. Without getting too technical, we need something called Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). TCP/IP used in the INternet is not that tolerant of delays. It definately won't handle delays of  few weeks while disks are shipped around. Or the 20 mins or so for data to tranvel from Earth to Mars. So  a protocol called DTN has been developed to handle that.

Now, this is where the University of California Berkley come in. They have a group called TIER - Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions and they have developed some software on top of DTN to handle replication of data across disconnected networks. And it works very much like the high level design that I had!

So how's that, God has gone ahead of us and had the folks at Berkley develop the software that we need!

Praise God.