• How The Anonymous Archivers FDN Works

    From warmfuzzy@700:100/0 to All on Thu May 16 23:58:34 2019
    PHATstar has had great success with the Anonymous Archivers file distro network. If we're just keeping our tools to ourselves we may miss more FDNs that pop up from other groups. The technology behind the net is really great. We have a dedicated server, a remote server, and some software. The
    dedicated server can be replaced by whatever primary server computer you have running the network. You will need Linux on the primary and secondary
    servers. The software requirements are SSHFS and CrushFTP. CrushFTP
    provides access to contributors (such as a musician in one case) to place
    their new work onto the system using either a graphical user interface (GUI)
    or through SFTP with FileZilla at the user's convenience. The SSHFS maps one Linux file system to another Linux file system.

    So the main server has OpenSSH installed as well as CrushFTP. The secondary server has SSHFS and OpenSSH on its system. The primary server "mounts" a selected directory on the secondary system as a directory under the primary server. So the primary server "serves" the files to the users through Mystic BBS, and the files are pulled from the secondary server via a network mount point that seamlessly integrates the remote file system onto the primary server's file system. This is done when the primary server already holds all the files that it can and have the additional files be retreived from a more upgradable system such as your home computer.


    The format for mounting the remote directory onto the primary server follows:

    sshfs [user name on remote server]@[remote servers IP address]:/[remote directory to mount] [local mount point] -o allow_other

    In practice this is what PHATstar is using:

    sshfs anonymous@1.2.3.4:/media/anonymous/anonymousarchive/storageremote /storageremote -o allow_other

    (this only thing changed from the above is the IP address, everything else is what we use and it works very well).

    As for CrushFTP, it allows a very easy importing of SSH/TLS certificates so that your communication with the server is relatively secure. You can get CrushFTP from www.crushftp.com.

    This makes for a secure file server that providese files to the BBS community in a method that allows for expandabilty.

    If anyone has any questions about this setup please write me back and I can guide you through the setup for implementation on your network. It works really well and appears to the software as if the files were just like any other files on the system, just a slower media which Zmodem works perfectly with. Props to the SSHFS system dev's and to the CrushFTP dev.

    Best regards,
    warmfuzzy

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A39 2018/04/21 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: Sp00knet Master Hub [PHATstar] (700:100/0)