Strongspace 1.0

Last “night” (my night, Justin’s morning, perhaps your afternoon?), we took the wrappers off the Strongspace site and opened it up for business.

As it says on the Strongspace site it can be used to

  • store backup copies of important files and documents off-site
  • share files with family & friends, or with work colleagues
  • backup your laptop while traveling
  • access your files from anywhere
  • upload files and integrate seamlessly with your Basecamp account

The basic idea was to initially release this part of TextPanel that provides for

  • a new site,
  • automated signup and backend account auditing,
  • fully encrypted payment processing and invoicing,
  • SFTP/RSync/Unison access to system users,
  • A complete MySQL-backend to everything (including system user information and logins … there is no /etc/passwd),
  • A file browser,
  • Web-based access controls where you can jail users to a specific directory and even make then only able to read files.

What makes Strongspace different from many of the others? All interactions you do are over entirely encrypted channels (SFTP, rsync+ssh, https), all of your account info is keyed and encrypted, and like how we always do, everything is backed up everyday. There is no option to do otherwise. The hardware and cabinets are HIPPA/Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, and the near future includes additional plans with the option of using a fiber attached storage array with an encrypted file system (thank you EMC!).

You’ll even notice when you download something in the file browser, the URL is a unique, hashed URL (provided for by Lighttpd’s mod_secdownload)

And being in Rails, where the underlying logic scales well because the parts are easily separated on a gigabit-connected network, what “strongspace” really represents for us is a combination of work on the systems and programming sides so that we could have a cluster setup that can comfortably sit on a 42 Terabyte (42 million megabyte) SAN and serve a couple billion users (sure sure that’s a joke number but seriously we’ve tested it). It’ll do this while providing for an easy way to setup a site and have a completely compliant “e-commerce” backend.

There was a great deal of behind the scenes work on encryption libraries (thank you Jamis for one of them), database-backed system user management, and changes were made and developed from the kernel up to the application and hit most of the stuff in between.

This is what makes TextDrive interesting to me: kernel-to-content work that’s able to soon control and shape all the parts from the network up. While essentially building what we as users ourselves would want, and not simply looking to become an ever-fatter hosting company with a few plans.

The real congratulations goes to Justin French and Ryan Schwartz, who headed the two respective “sides”, and to our top notch development team of Marten Veldthuis, Michael Koziarski, and Johan Sörensen. They taken this first branch through about a 1000 commits. Also thanks to Terrell and Kris for the thoughtful and careful copyediting, and numerous (subsequently implemented) suggestions.

The scary part is that these guys are just getting warmed up.

So watch out.

And go buy yourself 4 gigs

·:· Posted 3 August 2005, 03:05 by Jason Hoffman to Rails  |  

  1. Nice review, I’m just wondering why there is no link to strongspace website !! Could be useful…

    — tim    30 August 2005, 12:47    #
  2. oooops .. sorry… haven’t seen it – sorry for that…
    (there are two links ! double-sorry)

    — tim    30 August 2005, 12:48    #