Routing - Bootstrapping

Development
1

In the latest Dev-update there are some nice links found to flowcharts about bootstrapping and node discovery. Quite a great starting point for understanding the more in depth functions of SAFE. This topic is meant to understand how the bootstrapping of a node works. I hope others will join this road to discovery. We should only poke the Dev’s when we really get stuck in the system. Until that moment I think we can do an amazing job discovering the inner workings of Routing and Bootstrapping.

Here’s the top part of the bootstrapping flowchart.

1595×761 76.6 KB

So what do we actually see? There are 4 addresses named:

  • Address A
  • Address B
  • Address X (NAE Manager of A)
  • Address Y (Relocated close group of A)

Address A and B appear to be on the normal IP-level. Address X and Y appear to be in XOR-space.
When the Client connects to SAFE it starts at IP-level. In this case we see that Client (A) connects to an IP-address (B) and provides it’s public key. If Client (A) is new to B than B will add Client A to it’s Client map. It will also provide it’s own public key to A. That way fully encrypted communication is guaranteed from the start. B will also provide the current quorum-size and that’s very interesting. Quorum-size is on XOR-level isn’t it? It seems that node A is the Client and node B is the Relaynode for A. And what did we learn about the Relaynode??

769×429 32.9 KB

So B seems to be both in IP-level and XOR-level and I guess that’s why quorum size already comes in so early. We now have communication between the Client(A) and it’s Relaynode(B). The next step for the Client is to get a Networkname from the NAE-managers:

GetNetworkName Request
From: Client(A)
To: NAE Manager(A)

This is the part where the Client(A) tries to join SAFE on XOR-level. It can’t create it’s own XOR-address (NetworkName) so it needs other nodes on XOR-level to provide one. It doesn’t connect directly to the NAE-Manager but uses it’s Relaynode (B) as a “proxy”.

Okay, just a start. Feel free to add, correct, extend or whatever. We’ll take it step by step to get errors out and get full understanding ;-).

9 Likes