Status Report for Date 11/2/2006 to Date 11/15/2006

Recently, I keep on working on Maze. I have done following tasks this two weeks:
1.
I write an detailed article to introduce Maze. The content includes architecture, componentss, implementation and so on. This article almost covers all aspects of Maze and I will refine it in following days.

Link: http://156.56.104.196/introduction2maze.pdf
2.
To make future upgrade easy, I change OS from redhat to ubuntu. For future study and research, because software environment in which maze runs is obsolete I upgraded the enviroment. I installed new version of library, complier and so on.
3.
At server side, I compile and install all components of Maze.

Solved Difficulty:
The greatest difficulty results from the jumbled source code package which Maze group sent to us. The structure of directories is chaotic and files for server side and client side intertwine together. Some errors in makefile and souce code. Almost in every step, I needed to modify makefile or source code. So progress was slow. I sent email to members of maze group and they told me they were organizing maze souce code and it would take a long time. However, after hard work, I have installed all components successfully.

Next Step:

Configure and try to run maze!!

Brief Introduction to Maze:

Architecture Overview:

Components:
l. Directory server:
collect sharing directories of every peer and build a central database. If a user create or modify sharing directories, the update information will be sent to Directory Server antomatically to update the database.
2. Index Server
Based on database on directory server, Index Server builds index for all files of all peers and provide search service.
Procedure of building index is not triggered every time sharing directory of a certain user changes. The reason is performance. So index is built periodically according to actual condition.
Note:
When providing search service, index server needs to access heart server to narrow search result into files of current on-line users.
3. User Server
Implement user registry and user certification.
4. Heart Server maintain list of current on-line users and corresponding status. Periodically(several seconds) client sends short message to heart server to let server know that this client is on-line.

Full Text can be obtained here:
http://156.56.104.196/introduction2maze.pdf