Anonymous read only replicas

[Zachary Amsden <zach@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Any plans to implement anonymous read-only replicas?

These would most likely be replicas that can't communicate
frequently, or have other real world constraints.

Proposed method of doing this would be:
assign reserved replica ID (-1?) for anonymous
servers keep no update vectors for anonymous replicas
connections are consumer initiated only
host security/anonymous replication allowed is server
configurable

An example (albeit poor) of this would be, say there is some
IETF host that stores RFC pages and drafts as LDAP records. 
Every interested party would need a replication agreement with
IETF to sync their private LDAP servers with this, which is
clearly unacceptable.

Partial update could be allowed if the update vector given by
the initiating party was recent enough that all changes were
known -- otherwise a total update would be required.

Total updates could be subject to administrative policy (i.e
only X sync/(month-host) could be allowed to prevent possible
DOS attacks.

Comments welcome...

Zach Amsden
zach@xxxxxxxxxxxxx