[cks-devl] syncing

[M. Drew Streib]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 01:42:16PM -0400, V Alex Brennen wrote:
> There's a general write up (the beginnings of technical documentation
> in the file: cks-0.0.5/doc/syncing.html

Thanks. I see that now.

Btw, your description of the pksd email syncing is not entirely accurate.
pksd also uses the MTA to pipe the mail to a shell script, which basically
saves the mail to a local spool and calls a separate program to process
it. It does not rely on a pop3 box.

Also, the 'infinite propagation' problem you describe is also handled by
pksd, in having the list of servers already sync'd to carried with the
message. This is _extremely_ useful, because it allows you to connect to
any node on the network, and have a full sync. With your current method,
if a new server entered, and every keyserver maintainer didn't add them,
you'd end up splitting the ring slowly.

> keyrings.  I'll add support for these soon, but for right now the
> keys in keyrings are just ignored by cks_mail_sync.  This appears
> to be about 40% of the incoming keys.

Yes, this will eventually be necessary.

>  - If it's different merge it
>  - If it's the same just continue
>  - Free up memory
>  - Exit

To properly sync with pksd servers, you'll also need to parse the
headers for the list of servers that the message has already travelled
to, and allow comparison with a local list, addition of your own node's
sync email, and repropagation to those that are in your list, but not
in the list of those already sent to.

Unfortunately, without this function, I wouldn't be able to use cksd in
place of pksd, without giving up most of my sync ability.

> No problem at all. I was allot more liberal with the cks_email_sync
> program, because I expected to be the only one running it.  I'm
> currently using it to sync with pgp.net thanks to Francisco.

I'll also set this up to sync dtype.org with pgp.dtype.org in the same
manner. As mentioned above, cksd currently allows syncs 'to' somewhat,
but pretty much completely ignores pksd syncs 'from' your own daemon
to the others on the pksd network.

> This is all still early alpha, so everyone on this list should
> expect to see allot of complaints and bug reports.  Hopefully,
> in the near future I will fold all the CGI programs into the
> cksd daemon and stability and quality will improve greatly.

That would be handy.

> Also, this is my first Unix daemon, so this is very much still
> a learning experience for me.  Since I'm kind of new to this,
> criticism and suggestions are welcome.  For example, any hints
> on a better way to handle error and status logging would be
> appreciated - but I'd rather but tax syslog like pksd.

I wouldn't worry about taxing syslogd. That is what it is there for.
It also adds a lot of additional function that you won't be able to
match. (For instance, do you plan to add remote logging capability to
your daemon? ;)

-drew

-- 
M. Drew Streib <address@hidden> | http://dtype.org/
FSG <address@hidden>    | Linux International <address@hidden>
freedb <address@hidden>        | SourceForge <address@hidden>

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