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encouraging the distributed way
  • zehzeh March 2011

    @dmytri has emphasized again the need for a distributed, p2p practice for Thimbl (not just underlying architecture) and how it should be present in our priorities and communication. I agree with this, it's what sets Thimbl apart. It's not easy though. There are a lot of obstacles, some technical - such as difficulty in running daemons behind NATs and firewalls, of people not having the resources (like always-on servers) or knowledge to set it up by themselves. I think these obstacles need to be dealt with separately. With regards to the telecoms getting in the middle of communication and in our way and generally ripping the end-to-end principle to shreds, there's some code for setting up tunnels automatically that may be of help here: http://pagekite.net/. Maybe we can include it, maybe with mammatus, @dmytri? As to the other aspects, documentation on how to DIY will help and is needed. But still, there is much variety out there and to drive adoption some straight forward way of sharing the load of setting things up would help too. In the process, maybe more people will group and get and control domain names and servers and email... I'm rambling now. My thinking was that encouraging groups of users grab control of their communication resources and sharing the burden of administration would be good. (cc @all)

  • dmytridmytri March 2011

    Hey @zeh, yes, eventually things like PageKite or Unhosted could play a role, for sure. I also agree that one step at a time is best, and that each of the concerns you mentioned should be handled individually.

    For now, we only support always-on servers, that can run finger, this makes sense as the place to start, since each of these servers could host many users. So, basically we are targeting small organizations, ideally. As far as NAT goes, we should have port forwarding instructions, which @humanite will include in his ubuntu home server howto.

    But this is certainly only the beginning, we should definitely engineer support for pretty much any host that can have a DNS zone record pointed at it. Anything less that that, should only run a client.

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