About DustFS and its features
There are several network filesystems, so why build a new one? The use case we thought about initially was a group of 10-50 people who want to share files in a trustworthy network in which everyone knows each other.
We needed an efficient yet simple distribution. A central server using NFS, Samba or some other filesystem was not feasible as we do not have enough storage/bandwidth available. Also, we disfavour FTP, HTTP or other central servers but rather like a filesystem to be able to use basic UNIX programs such as find or grep and directly play movies without manually storing them somewhere first.
So, we implemented a BitTorrent engine to enable fast file sharing. However, it is not BitTorrent alone which enables high-speed downloads, but rather the so-called caches: Servers with high bandwidth and low to medium storage capacity automatically join downloads so that other clients profit by loading pieces from the caches very fast.
The trust in DustFS is based on every participant knowing each other in real life and verified technically using SSL certificates and full encryption (AES-XTS-256).
Want to know how something specifically works? Check out the documentation.
