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Welcome to the Syndicate wiki. These pages are meant to provide an overview of how to use Syndicate, and how it is put together.

Overview

Syndicate organizes your data into one or more Volumes. A Volume is a logical collection of data organized into a filesystem. Syndicate's components work together to implement your Volumes on top of your cloud storage and caches.

There are four major components of Syndicate: the Metadata Service (MS), the User Gateway (UG), the Replica Gateway (RG), and the Acquisition Gateway (AG):

• The MS is an always-on service that Gateways use to coordinate--in many ways, it's similar to a private BitTorrent tracker.
• The UGs are end-points on your clients that cache and exchange Volume data and metadata on your behalf, and give you read/write interfaces to your data. For example, there is a FUSE UG, and a Web store UG.
• RGs are proxies that take data from UGs and back it up to your storage, so other UGs can get to it.
• AGs are proxies that expose external, existing datasets as read-only directory hierarchies in your Volumes.

At a minimum, you need to deploy the MS, one UG, and one RG. That will get you Dropbox-like functionality.

Getting Started

1. Set up or find an MS to use. If you have an account at PlanetLab or VICCI, you can use the one at https://syndicate-metadata.appspot.com. To get an account on this MS, send an email to syndicate [AT] lists [dot] NOSPAM [dot] cs [dot] princeton [dot] edu.
2. Set up and learn how to use syntool.
3. Create a Volume.
4. Create a User Gateway to access your Volume.
5. Create a Replica Gateway to keep your Volume's data backed in the cloud.
6. Create an Acquisition Gateway to expose existing data as a Volume.

How-To

• How to deploy your own MS