Network2

Last updated: Michael Stone 05:16, 28 July 2009 (UTC) | paper version

Sugar's desired realtime collaboration experience can only be provided atop a robust and efficient network stack designed to accommodate automated diagnosis and standardized workarounds -- anything less only wastes students' and teachers' time and patience, contrary to our human interface guidelines.

This essay summarizes an attempt to work out a simple way to realize this sort of network experience, with existing software and hardware, while also demonstrating the sort of thinking which might help other parts of the system achieve the same standard of quality.

Quick links: the Paper

• Prior work: networking, collaboration, network principles
• Background: purpose, scenarios, architecture
• Designs: naming and internetworking, security ideas, diagnosis techniques
• Analyses: cost model, self-test algorithm
• Experiments: dnshash, openvpn

Personal goals...

1. "I want to use familiar tools in my activities, like -- curl, ssh, rsync, and email -- both under a tree, in a walled garden, and out on the public Internet, without modification or wrappers."
2. "I want a design that has 20% fewer ways to fail, and that offers manual overrides for the failure modes that remain."
3. "I want to chop 2-3 levels from the current collaboration stack's 6-level 'fast-path'."
4. "I want to collaborate with people who only have web browsers -- they outnumber people with Jabber clients by millions."

Finally, to help out, please improve my writing, experiment with my ideas, and share this work with your friends!