[Server-devel] wwwoffle

[Andy Rabagliati]

On Fri, 01 Feb 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote:

> wad, have you seen http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/ ?
> 
> Wizzy digital courier is using a modified version of this to
> distribute internet content via sneakernet; it may be adaptable to our
> needs.  Combining this with an aggressive use of http for our
> versioning system would get us a lot of functionality in one leap.
> (Credit to SJ's content group, meeting next to my work area, for
> clueing me into this.)
> 
> Wizzy also has an email solution; our gmail solution really only works
> if internet access is constant.  Using a local IMAP mirror (as Wizzy
> seems to do) allows sneakernet mail distribution even when the
> internet link goes down.

I was referred to this thread by SJ - thanks.

Wizzy digital courier's system is fairly simple - all traffic is carried
over UUCP.

I have an implementation of UUCP over USB memory stick.

We use dialup where possible, and USB stick where it is not.

Mail over UUCP is carried using batched-smtp over UUCP, rather than the
old native mail-over-UUCP.

web traffic is implemented as follows :-

* At the scooper, a dynamic instance of wwwoffle is created in /var/tmp,
  pointing to a real proxy (also wwwoffle, but could be squid) upstream.

* wget pulls a site request (url + depth + on-offsite parameters)
  through this wwwoffle instance (discarding the result)

* the resulting cache is tarred up and compressed, and sent to the
  requestor via UUCP, where it is unpacked.

wwwoffle's cache heirarchy makes this possible.

tarballs are named in 8.3 notation, and stored in a directory on the
stick (for USB stick transport) named for sender/receiver. This allows a
single stick to be used for multiple schools.

There is a lot of trust involved, with little security at the moment.

It is written in a mishmash of perl and shell.

Cheers,    Andy!