only code is pure

The Filesharing on the Congress Dilemma

File Sharing on the congress works like that:

1. there are quite a lot of people with somewhat potent servers and quite a lot disk space (2tb and more). These people are willing to share their data (e.g. linux distributions and so on) and even configure ftp access.
2. these people put their servers either on the desk they are sitting or putting them in the congress colocation.
3. the servers get static ip addresses and may or may not land in the C3 Wiki under: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/wiki/FTP .
4. servers in this list may or may not work correctly, have no anonymous account or the queue is full or the servers are offline.
5. everyone on the congress simply downloads torrents from the 'real' internet because it is just so much faster.

All in all the state of file sharing at the congress is really sad despite the fact that provided hardware is pretty damn good. All it needs is a bit[#]_ streamlining and everything should be fine.

The Core Idea

The basic idea is to have an USB-Stick which contains a minimal OS specifically intended for creating a file sharing host. The OS may have minimal impact on the disks attached to the host and mount all the disks or raid arrays previously created and prepared. It should just export with one of the many possible file sharing methods. Besides legacy FTP we want to deploy 'cool' file sharing methods, such as Advanced Direct Connect.

In addition to that we want a command and control channel, as well as a simple means of searching through the storage provided by the hosts. On top of everything the nodes should create statistics of how awesome they are at sharing all these data.