Osiris (Serverless Portal System)

Osiris Serverless Portal System

Osiris
Developer(s)	kodeware, srl
Initial release	March 17, 2010; 19 months ago (2010-03-17)
Stable release	0.13
Development status	Current/Active
Written in	C++
Operating system	Windows, GNU/Linux
Available in	Multilingual
Type	Peer-to-peer file sharing, Forum
License	Freeware
Website	osiris.kodeware.net

Osiris Serverless Portal System (usually abbreviated as Osiris sps or Osiris) is a freeware program used to create web portals distributed via peer-to-peer networking (P2P) and autonomous from centralized servers. It's available for Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux operating system.

Unlike common tools used to "publish information" on the Internet eg CMS, Forums or Blogs which are based on a centralized system, the data of a portal created by Osiris are shared via P2P between all its participants. Thanks to this architecture in which all the contents necessary for navigation (both graphic and textual) are replicated on every machine you can use the portal without a central server (serverless). This prevents the possibility that the portal is not accessible due to DDoS attacks, Internet Service Provider limitations (like traffic shaping and censorship) or hardware failure. In this way a web portal can be operated at very low costs and free from external control.

History

The project was born following a similar initiative KeyForum. At that time, Berserker contributed to that project, but he decided to start from scratch a new project (writing entirely in C++), following a radically different strategy, in order to develop something truly indestructible and decentralized. Another reason for this new project is that he wanted to develop a software not limited to the sole component of web forum. Clodo joined the project several months later. On October 2, 2006, after 2 years of development, Osiris was officially announced. At present time the team is composed of 2 developers (Clodo & Berserker), two employees (DanielZ and Rei.Andrea) and a group of supporters/beta-testers (many of whom were already on the team KeyForum).

Starting from version 0.12, Osiris has become multi-platform, this was possible by migrating from the Visual Studio to the wxWidgets library.

Key features

Osiris has many features that make it a unique product at present; it is the result of a union between peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and web portals.

• It allows anyone to create a web portal for free, without depending on anyone or needing special technical knowledge.
• Allows you to create content anonymously, allowing you to contribute to freedom of expression and speech.
• Osiris offers a full-text search engine that allows searching across all portals' content.
• Low resource utilization: with the increase of users in a portal there is a reduction of the workload on single nodes, as work is distributed among all network nodes.
• Uses P2P infrastructure (based on Kademlia) for the portals distribution, a field where there are few and difficult-to-use alternatives.
• Administration is based on the reputations system, which is a new way to manage users in a distributed system without using central servers.

Basic concepts

Osiris differs from classic P2P programs in that it is focused on security and distributed data management.

Security

• The system is anonymous. It's not possible to make an association between a user and his IP address, hence you cannot trace the person who created a content.
• Even with physical access to an Osiris installation it is impossible to trace the actual user without knowing his password.
• 2048-bit digital keys guarantee the authenticity of content (digitally signed in order to prevent counterfeiting) and the confidentiality of private messages (encrypted between the sender and recipient).
• To prevent the ISP from intercepting traffic, connections and data transfer to a portal (called alignment), Osiris uses random ports which are cloaked during handshake and encrypted point-to-point via 256-bit AES.
• The P2P distribution allows content to be present in multiple copies as a guarantee of survival in case of hardware failure or nodes off-line.
• As the portals are saved locally, you can read the contents even if you work off-line.

Reputations system

The Reputations system and the subsequent generation of multiple points of view of a portal is one of the most innovative aspects of the program. Unlike "traditional" systems where the computational work (calculation of statistics, indexing of content, etc ...) is always made by a central server, Osiris use a distributed approach, where the majority of the works is made by users of a portal, due to this there may be more distinct points of view of a portal, depending on used account.

Each user is free to give reputation (positive or negative) to another user according to its contribution to the portal, based on these reputations, the system processes the pages by removing the contents of users evaluated negatively (such as spammers) and importing the reputations of users considered positively. This allow the creation of a network of assessments that allows management of a portal. Note that each client processes the data independently on its machine in a process that is called stabilization of the portal.

Monarchists and Anarchists Portals

When you create an Osiris portal, you can choose between two systems of moderation "anarchist" and "monarchy", the choice must be made during the creation of the portal and can't be changed after its creation.

• In an anarchic portal every user can make a reputation (positive or negative) about another user and share his vote with the other subscribers of the portal creating a network of reputations. Using this method a portal could be moderated without the use of a central server. The first reputation is always positive and is set to the administrator, the user which publishes the invitation link (digitally signed) to the portal.
• In a monarchy portal the only users that can generate reputations are the portal administrator and moderators that he considered positively, while for others users this option is disabled. In this way, only they are allowed to delete or promote the contents of a portal.

Isis Gateway

Isis is a web gateway to Osiris portals, written in PHP 5, through which it's possible to browse a portal without installing Osiris on your PC.

The particularity of Isis is the management of the workload and the data, which don't lie on the public server that is running Isis, but is managed by the various nodes running Osiris. Isis only forwards web requests from visitors to the nodes that have become available to it, minimizing the use of resources from the server through the load-balancing of requests.

Since it's not technically possible to guarantee anonymity in this type of architecture, all accesses by Isis are read-only. This has the dual objective of ensuring the privacy of users and encourage the use of Osiris to actively participate to a portal.

Future plans

• Currently the software is available on Linux and Windows, but the next version will support OS X, too.
• For the future is planned a system for managing data stored on disk, called survival engine, which automatically delete the excess or unnecessary contents to keep the database more light and fast, reducing the time needed to stabilize the portal. Sadly, due to its complexity, this project is still under study by Osiris developers.
• Besides this the developers are working on various optimizations, focusing mainly on the system alignment and stabilization to make it faster and less resource-intensive.
• On March 18, 2010, Osiris SPS developers announced (in their kodeware.net forums) that they are planning to migrate Osiris SPS into a GPL licensed open source software project in the following months^[1]

See also

	Software portal
	Internet portal

• Forum
• Anonymous P2P
• Freenet

References

1. ^ Italian / English announcement of GPLing source code of Osiris OSS GPL forum announcement post

External links

• Official website
• Support Forum Osiris official forum

This network-related software article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.v · Categories: Network software stubs Anonymous file sharing networks Distributed data storage 2006 software Software that uses wxWidgets Wikimedia Foundation. 2010. Игры ⚽ Поможем сделать НИР The Osirian Portal Osiris Rising Look at other dictionaries: Osiris (Serverless Portal System) — Osiris …   Википедия Osiris (disambiguation) — Osiris is an Egyptian deity. Osiris may also refer to: Astronomy: Osiris (planet) or HD 209458 b, an extrasolar planet Osiris (lunar crater), a lunar crater Osiris (Ganymede crater), a crater on Ganymede Osiris mission, a proposed NASA Discovery… …   Wikipedia Osiris (Système de Portail Sans Serveur) — Osiris Système de Portail Sans Serveur (en anglais Osiris Serverless Portal System, généralement abrégé en Osiris sps ou Osiris) est un logiciel freeware utilisé pour créer des portails Web distribués via un réseau P2P indépendant de serveurs… …   Wikipédia en Français P2P anonyme — Attention : cette page, provenant de la Wikipédia anglophone, est en cours de traduction et d aménagement ! Un travail de restructuration et de synthèse serait nécessaire. Un système de communications P2P anonyme est un réseau pair à… …   Wikipédia en Français Peer-to-peer — Not to be confused with point to point. This article is about peer to peer computing. For other uses, see Peer to peer (disambiguation). A peer to peer system of nodes without central infrastructure …   Wikipedia Peer-to-peer — Ejemplo de una red basada en peer to peer. Una red Peer to Peer o red de pares o red entre iguales o red entre pares o red punto a punto (P2P, por sus siglas en inglés) es una red de computadoras en la que todos o algunos aspectos funcionan sin… …   Wikipedia Español 18+ © Academic, 2000-2024 Contact us: Technical Support, Advertising Dictionaries export, created on PHP, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, MODx. Mark and share Search through all dictionaries Translate… Search Internet Share the article and excerpts Direct link … Do a right-click on the link above and select “Copy Link”