#storjproject

Dear Storj Supporters, We have been upgrading our infrastructure and systems over the past few weeks in preparation for the next release. As part of this we restarted the DriveShare and dataserv-client backend monitoring services. As a consequence, all testers running the command line dataserv-client or the DriveShare GUI, must restart their clients to keep participating in Test Group B and continue earning rewards. Simply restart all currently running clients, and everything will work normally. We appreciate your patience and support.

Dear Storj Supporters,

We are excited to announce the release of DriveShare GUI v0.3.4 it is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

As you can see above, DriveShare is pretty intuitive to use:

1. Enter your SJCX Payout Address 2. Select where to keep the data 3. Select how much storage to share 4. Click start

This is an alpha build, there might still be issues. Please post an issue if you run into problems and please attach a screenshot with the logs window open (click View Logs). You can make bug reports here.

Next we are going to release a new version of the GUI, with multi-drive functionality (as pictured). Stay tuned! For any support questions feel free to ask away on our Community Slack.

Thank you for being part of Test Group B! Please continue testing and enjoy the rewards!

Storj Labs adds Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy to Technical Advisory Board

October 29, 2015 (Atlanta, Georgia) -- Distributed cloud storage company, Storj Labs, today announced that AB Periasamy has joined the company’s Technical Advisory Board. The announcement coincides with the company’s launch of commercial operations and inclusion in Needham Co’s recently published, “The Blockchain Report: Welcome to the Internet of Value” (http://storj.io/TheBlockchainReport.pdf).

AB Periasamy is the CEO and Co-Founder of Minio.io, which provides object storage inspired by Amazon S3 and Facebook Haystack, and is the former CTO and Co-founder of Gluster, an open source storage operating system (acquired by Red Hat in 2014). AB also serves as a Venture Advisor to Nexus Venture Partners.

“We’re extremely pleased to have AB join our team as we release the world’s first crowdsourced cloud storage platform,” said CEO Shawn Wilkinson.

About Storj Labs Inc. Storj Labs Inc. (formerly the Storj Project) is developing the world’s first distributed cloud storage platform. Storj Labs believes that the cloud should be cheap, reliable, and secure, and that anyone can be a part of it. Incorporated in 2015, Storj Labs is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and employs people around the world.

Disclaimer: This guide is presented as-is. Please understand that you will be making changes to your system and the authors and maintainers of this guide cannot be held responsible if something goes terribly wrong. That said, this is the method I used to install dataserv-client on my diskstation. It may not be the best method, but it worked for me.

1. Add SynoCommunity repository. a. Log onto the NAS using an administrator account. Main Menu → Package Center → Settings → Package Sources. b. Click Add, and name the new package SynoCommunity at the location http://packages.synocommunity.com/. Press OK. c. Under Trust Level, Allow Installation of packages published by: select “Synology Inc. and trusted publishers.”

2. Go back to the Package Center and install Python (by the Python Software Foundation) and Debian Chroot packages. Remember which volume you install Debian Chroot, as you will need this information later.   

3. Restart your NAS.

4. Enable Root Login for SSH    a. Main Menu→Control Panel → Terminal & SNMP.    b. Under the Terminal tab, click Enable SSH Service and then Apply.

5. Use a terminal client (for instance, PuTTY) to log into your Synology. Use root as the username, and your administrator password. Please be sure to exercise best practices when selecting a password, as a server with ssh exposed to the internet will find itself under regular brute force attacks. You should see a prompt:

DISKSTATION>

A brief note on Debian Chroot Debian Chroot basically simulates a Debian system within your Diskstation’s operating system. The simulated root directory is located at

/volume1/@appstore/debian-chroot/var/chroottarget/root/

within the Synology’s “real” file system. In theory, the simulated OS cannot see any files above the chroottarget directory, but there are ways around that (see 13a). Debian Chroot enables certain functions that your Diskstation’s stripped-down Linux cannot perform (such as apt-get). We will be installing running dataserv-client from within this special environment.

6. Add repositories for Debian Chroot. a. You will be installing certain packages via Debian Chroot’s apt-get function. However, apt-get needs to know where to download these packages. You will need to use Linux’s text editor, vi, in order to edit Debian Chroot’s “sources.list” file so that it knows where to find these repositories.

A brief note on vi Vi is linux’s command line text editor. The information below should be enough to get you through this process, but some more information about how to use it can be found here: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~cslab/vi.html.

b. Type the following at the prompt to open this file in vi. (Replace volume1 with the volume where you installed Debian Chroot).  

DISKSTATION> vi ../volume1/@appstore/debian-chroot/var/chroottarget/etc/apt/sources.list

c. Press “i” (as in Insert) to start editing text. Paste the following three lines at the top of the file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main contrib

deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie main contrib

d. Press Escape, then ZZ (as in, Shift-Z-Z) to save changes and exit. If you want to exit vi without saving changes, press the colon key “:” and then enter “q!” at the prompt.

7. At this point, you can run dataserv-client as normal. To exit Debian Chroot, you can type exit. After exiting vi, type “reboot” to restart your machine. Then log in again as before with PuTTY. 8. At the prompt DISKSTATION>, start Debian Chroot by entering the text below.

DISKSTATION> /var/packages/debian-chroot/scripts/start-stop-status chroot

This will present you with a new prompt root@DISKSTATION:/#. When you see this prompt, you are working in the chroot environment.  

9. At the new prompt, enter the following:

root@DISKSTATION:/# apt-get update

root@DISKSTATION:/# apt-get install python3 python3-pip git

10. Next, install dataserv-client (1.1.0)  via PIP, and then upgrade to 1.3.0.  

root@DISKSTATION:/# pip3 install dataserv-client==1.3.0

root@DISKSTATION:/# dataserv-client version

root@DISKSTATION:/# sudo pip3 install dataserv-client --upgrade

root@DISKSTATION:/# dataserv-client version

11. Then type dataserv-client to start the program. Some versions may require you to type the full name with the extension, dataserv-client.py

12. At this point, you can run dataserv-client as normal. To exit Debian Chroot, you can type exit.  

13. Some additional tips: a. By default, dataserv-client places built shards in /root/.storj/store. Within the “real” filesystem, this is actually located in

/volume1/@appstore/debian-chroot/var/chroottarget/root/.storj/store

Where volume1 represents the volume in which you installed Chroot. I prefer to send the shards to a directory which I can access in DSM’s file manager. Therefore, I call the following commands outside the chroot environment, before running the build command:

DISKSTATION> mkdir ~/../volume1/storj

DISKSTATION> mount -o bind ~/../volume1/storj/ ~/../volume1/@appstore/debian-chroot/var/chroottarget/root/.storj

This (1) creates a directory under volume 1 to receive the shards and (2) tells the server to redirect anything being sent to the latter directory (deep in the chroot filesystem) into the former directory (higher up, in the main filesystem). It’s sort of like making a shortcut that “tricks” the system and lets it place files in locations outside the chroot environment. You will have to remount this at every restart.

b. To ensure that dataserv-client will continue running after you close PuTTY, prefix it with the nohup command. To make sure it runs in the background, add an & character to the end of your command. When I run a build or a poll, I use both of these:

root@DISKSTATION:/# nohup dataserv-client --address=YourAddress poll &

c. If the process is running in the background, you can type ps | grep dataserv to identify the process id (PID) of the dataserv-client process, and terminate it by using the kill command. If the process is running in the foreground, you can terminate it with Ctrl-C. This works in both the chroot and normal environments.

d. When running “poll” in the background, you will not see any output that confirms that the process is working. It can be helpful to use strace -p PID (where PID is the process ID identified using ps) in order to confirm that a ping is being sent every 15 seconds or so. You can terminate strace (or rather, detach from the process) with Ctrl-C. This works in both the chroot and normal environments.  

e. You can use du ~/.storj/store to track the size of your storage directory (in KB) as the shards are built (assuming that ~/.storj/store is your storage directory). By default the directory size is reported in kilobytes, which can be unwieldy. Add a -h tag to the end to make it more human readable (e.g. du ~/.storj/store -h). This command (du) works both inside and outside the chroot environment; just keep in mind that the directory path will be different in each one.  

f. You can use top within the chroot environment in order to see how long dataserv-client has been running. Use this in conjunction with the du command described above in order to calculate the rate of a build (as in, gigabytes/minute). You can use top in the regular environment, but it will not report a time.  

g. To manually update, kill any existing dataserv-client processes and use pip3 to remove and reinstall the package from git.  

root@DISKSTATION:/# pip3 uninstall dataserv-client

followed by one:  

root@DISKSTATION:/# pip3 install dataserv-client

Dear Storj supporters, Time has come for our March update on development and the progress we are making in defining the Storj platform architecture. Development updates Platform Architecture After concentrating on farming software we are taking a step back to define in detail all the interlocking components of the Storj platform, including: contract formats, contract negotiation and how different pieces interface together. We decided to use the Swift multiparty transport protocol (libswift.org), i.e. ‘bittorrent at the transport layer’. It has many benefits and will also help make Storj more suited to streaming. Libswift is also one of the technologies used by Tribler, a project aiming to mix torrent and torrent-like technology with onion routing to allow more anonymity. We are also looking at allowing contracts to specify verification schemes, depending on overhead. Current farming software can support Swizzle or Merkle, but we’re also looking at Meta Schemes like RSA’s HAIL. Initially we will probably pair that with the Telehash messaging network for bid broadcast and contract negotiation. Our end goal is for the basic Storj platform to be a low-level, decentralized marketplace for data. Expensive data transfer compared to cheap heartbeat can be competitive for archival storage, as opposed to cheaper data transfer, and more frequently, more expensive heartbeat, (e.g. CDN). By allowing for a marketplace this opens things up for heterogeneity and different competitive niches to exist. Storj software components will be as modular as possible, so people could swap in better file shard construction algorithms, different version contracts can support different verification schemes. Work is ongoing with the documentation and we are periodically adding new drafts on GitHub. Once it becomes comprehensive and detailed it will be the basis for a technical roadmap, which future tests and test groups will fall into. Having a solid architecture and roadmap will allow us to better coordinate and grow the core development team and ensure sustainable development on the platform. Technical Roadmap This relies mostly on the progress of ideas we have covered above. The next step is releasing the downstream-farmer 1 GB update and let our testers try it out as part of Test Group A. While we work on the roadmap, allowing for round-trip file testing will most likely be the next hallmark. We are also thinking to implement a MVP v1 contract in the network, future versions will support more flexibility. The roadmap will give the community and developers a better idea of where we are, what is being worked on, and where we’re going. This will make it easier for people to jump in and offer help, grow the project, and accelerate development. Patience: we had a lot of rapid progress and made a big push but it’s important to remember we’re building a platform and it’s imperative to do it in a solid fashion. It is necessary to invest time now to make things better and speed up development later. Contribution Guidelines As part of architecture and roadmap push, we’ve also put together some initial contribution guidelines for people looking to commit. It’s important to maintain a high-quality codebase, so that developers who want to contribute and/or submit prs need to follow the guidelines. Storj’s Codebase is mostly Python with a rapidly growing C/C++ base that can interface to Python, so developers highly proficient in one or all of these languages are welcome to start pitching in:

First on helping to formalize the architecture and roadmap.

Then on building the platform, of course.

Those with experience in distributed systems and cryptography, and the ones with solid programming skills are encouraged to contribute. Texas Bitcoin Conference - Austin, TX - March 27-29, 2015 Storj will be participating to the Texas Bitcoin Conference in Austin, Texas. We will have a booth and Shawn Wilkinson, our founder and lead developer, will host a speech. If you are planning to attend you are invited to come and see us, we will be pleased to answer any questions you may have. We will also have some big announcements to release. Storj was a Texas Bitcoin Conference Hackhaton Winner in 2014.

Storj Upgrade Party We will soon be releasing the next version of downstream-farmer, we will host a Storj Upgrade Party. The announcement together with a date and time will be through our newsletter and all of our channels. Stay tuned!