Checking out Storj

This past Friday there was a post about how storage of images is at the discretion of the image hosting service. If they decide to blacklist Steemit, POOF, there goes our images. The discussion was about using Storj to host. In the comments @vegascomic spoke about needing a server to serve up the images.

Well I decided to check out Storj, as a possible storage of images and other types of content. The installation went almost without a hitch. The one problem is that it expected you to be root user. I had to use:

npm install -g storj --unsafe-perm

instead of the normal command

npm install -g storj

All worked out in the end. After following the guides was able to save files and read files. Yeah for me!

Storj useability

For a new user, it has a lot to be desired.

Pros

• Key management (email plus pass-phrase) engaged forever one-time needed only.
• Interface based on Node.js.

Cons

• Have to manage bucket hash when writing.
• Have to manage bucket hash and file id hash when reading.

It's beta is showing. All the Cons can be encapsulated into another layer to remove the dirty-underwear showing. It is very doable to create single user repositories and servers. The lack of not having Read/Write/Read-Write/Delete permission keys would make this a non-starter, IMHO, for a community based storage mechanism.

I will continue to monitor Storj as a project to see how far along they get.

Storj farming

The other side of the coin is renting out your excess storage. This turned out to really be a "Houston we have a problem!" moment for me. I had no problem setting up a counter-wallet. It was the execution of the storage verify routine. As you may not know I'm using a refurbished workstation, The Kraken, and is she hungry. I also just added a 5TB external drive to store my VMs. Well enough said that my ubuntu VM in VirtualBox stopped cold after trying to get verified twice.

01:32:58.848242 VMMDev: vmmDevHeartbeatFlatlinedTimer: Guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received 4 seconds ago

Maybe this coming weekend I will try again. Each try took me about one and half hours before failure. I was so looking forward to making some duckets off the farming. Oh well!

Was it The Kraken or was it the VM? I can't tell and I feel that I spent enough time away from my dearest steemit.

Of note

@creatr is the man. Thanks for the idea for adding Emojis to the title bar.