WEEKLY STATUS REPORT -------------------- 1. Status of 0.7 codebase, particularly FCP
A major OutOfMemoryError-causing bug has been haunting 0.7 for some time, I am not sure I have killed it yet. However, memory usage of 0.7 has been reduced significantly through various optimizations. Putting a file from disk, and fetching a file to disk, via FCP, are now working. Offline requests (requests not tied to a specific connection) and persistent requests (offline requests which persist across node restarts) are not yet working. It has been decided that FCP in 0.7 will allow you to save files directly to disk and reconfigure the node, without a password. We may support one later, but as FCP is only available to localhost, and as a flag will be available to disable dangerous commands (for a public node), this seemed the best approach. On multi-user systems we strongly recommend that Freenet be run as its own, unprivelidged, user. Parts of URIs in 0.7 are no longer automatically URI-encoded. The practical impact of this is that you cannot include escaped slashes in filenames. On the other hand, this simplifies some code, allows you to include spaces in site names, eliminates some bugs, and allows for foreign characters to be included directly in site names. 0.7 remains an insecure testnet, and exclusively darknet topology i.e. manually set up connections. Fproxy and the connection setup protocol are also still insecure. Fproxy and Frost are working, and FCPv2 is nearing completion, although there is no up to date specification available yet. We still need more testers! 0.7 installation guide: http://wiki.freenetproject.org/FreenetAlphatestNodeInstallation 0.7 graphs: http://freeviz.freenetproject.org/~sleon/ FCPv2 spec and resources: http://wiki.freenetproject.org/FreenetFCPSpec2Point0 2. Public alpha and money We are still hoping for a public alpha in the near future. This will be a very early alpha, with full working FCPv2 (including offline and persistent requests), SNMP, probably config support and the new installer, and probably updatable keys. It may also have slightly better fproxy support (e.g. a homepage), depending on timing issues. We still have a fairly serious financial situation: The current paypal balance is $328.68, and I will need to be paid around the 16th. 3. Mirroring issues We have been having some serious issues with Coral Cache and downloads.freenetproject.org. Nextgens has been doing good work on this, and most of the time downloads succeed now because of the mirroring system he has set up. Many thanks to all who have volunteered to be official freenetproject mirrors. Nextgens is also working on the security issues raised by this. 4. SNMP Cyberdo has been exposing statistics in 0.7 via SNMP (accessible only to localhost, of course). This means you can now use MRTG, rrdtools and so on to produce pretty graphs. Hopefully we won't need such a monster of a diagnostics subsystem in 0.7. :) He has also proposed a plugin system for freenet 0.7, which could have wider uses; it is suggested that we can for example have Freemail as a plugin, running in the same VM as Fred, and we might split fproxy out similarly; included by default, but can be removed at will. 5. New installer Nextgens has started to build a java-based installer for 0.7. This would download the required files (or unpack them), verify the hashes to ensure security, ask basic configuration questions, and install the node. This is stalled at present due to lack of a working configuration system. I will implement config soon. On Windows, there would be a very small "shell" installer, which would download a JVM if necessary and then call the java-based installer. The advantages of a java-based installer are clear: It will be maintained, by the core devs, being the main one. Apart from that, it provides a consistent GUI for installation across all platforms (including mac and linux!). See https://emu.freenetproject.org/svn/trunk/apps/installer/ Also http://antinstaller.sourceforge.net/ 6. 0.7 on Free JVMs Nextgens has a branch of 0.7 which works on free JVMs. It has the older non-database-backed datastore, is buggy and extremely slow as yet (although the big-integer math is considerably faster on GCJ). Apart from the obvious ideological and strategic issues, running on GCJ would make packaging in linux distributions *much* easier, as Debian for example does not include a direct Sun Java package due to licensing issues. It also might result in improved performance in some areas, when it is fully debugged. See https://emu.freenetproject.org/svn/branches/freenet-freejvms/ 7. Functionality request from Robert Guerra Robert Guerra suggested that something similar to Martus could be developed for Freenet, for use by human rights groups operating in hostile environments. A basic first step would be a working email over freenet application, but there is more that can be done. http://emu.freenetproject.org/lurker/message/20060201.142347.bed15601.en.html -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20060206/a79cf129/attachment.pgp>
