Auditing should report the shard copy ID that failed and patching should remove it from the manifest about layr

[dylankb]

Yes, we should definitely do this! I'd add two small things. One, we should couple this change with creating a system to alert hosts that their modified shard has now become a "zombie". A log file with the original filename and SHA of the original shard will hopefully be enough to alert hosts that they are free to delete the hosted file. This isn't important for bad actors, but helps good ones keep their file systems clean.

Two, I think there's a fourth possible state for file accessibility - the file was deleted or the file name was changed. We should make sure to handle those as well.

[WilfredTA]

For the first case, if a host modified a file, wouldn't you consider them a bad actor?

Also, the second case is already handled.

[dylankb]

I think it's certainly possible that someone could accidentally edit a shard without meaning to. For example, if you open a shard file in the Atom text editor and save the file, Atom will automatically insert a new line character by default. This is a pretty subtle change, but would make the shard fail the audit. But what do you think?

Oh good! I see that was added to my auditing branch yesterday. What I wrote didn't consider that case so 👍

[WilfredTA]

That's a fair point, yeah. I believe that if the newline was deleted, the shard would still fail the audit, but I'm not sure. I tried experimenting with adding and deleting content of a shard and the audit failed even after the added content was removed. It's worth experimenting and researching that.

Yeah, it does seem pretty easy to accidentally manipulate a file, then. We can certainly implement a notification system to take care of zombie shards, then.

So, if an audit fails we can let the failing host node know (if they're online), and if they're not online, well the result of the shard audit will be that 3rd state, which is handled by generating a new copy which is then distributed, but keeping it in the manifest file