Ask Slashdot: Building a Personal FOSS Cloud?

An anonymous reader writes "Cloud-based personal data management is pretty cool... if you don't mind entrusting the entirety of your personal data to a gigantic corporation. Apart from the risks of their doing unseemly things with your data, also the security of your data is entirely in their unreliable hands. So, is it possible to build my own personal data repository, where for example, I can store my contacts and calendars to sync to multiple devices? This could be hosted on any third party hosting service assuming also that all of my data was encrypted at the data level. So even if the host wanted to look at my data, all they'd see is 1s and 0s. What are the options for the tinfoil hat wearing FOSS folks that want to participate in the cloud age?"

Comments

Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[BagOBones]

http://owncloud.org/

- Calendar
- Contacts
- dropbox like storage

Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[Bob9113]

http://owncloud.org/

It's pretty cool, but right on the first page it pulls code from googleapis.com. Hit the front page and you send a request with the referrer URL to one of the biggest stalkers. Maybe it's still good, maybe it's not hard to redirect that js link to your own machine, but it just seems like they've missed the fundamental point of not giving your data away.

Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual ownCloud application that you setup on your server doesn't have a reference to googleapis. I just checked on my installation.

For those wondering, the project website links to the jQuery library hosted on Google's server so they don't have to host it themselves.

Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[icebraining]

For those wondering, the project website links to the jQuery library hosted on Google's server so they don't have to host it themselves.

And more importantly, so that we don't have to be constantly re-download the same file, since we probably already have Google's copy cached.

We're working on it

[wurp]

https://github.com/wurp/Friendly-Backup

It works now, with some bugs. The first targeted usecase is distributed backup.

However, it can store arbitrary read-only content-addressed data as well as signed labels that point point to a particular piece of CBA data to emulate mutable data.

I have a whole slew of plans beyond backup for it, but backup seemed like the thing everyone needs and would most like to have for free on a federated data store.

Freedombox

[Qubit]

slashdot ate my last comment, so just check out the link

Re:Freedombox

[Anonymous Coward]

For more context: http://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-FreedomInTheCloud2010

don't trust others...

[swell]

the safest storage is your own high speed server quality RAID 7 write-only drive

SparkleShare

[SpzToid]

Try the free open-source SparkleShare software and roll your your own cloud 100%. That would trump any cloud provider option if this is your concern, since all the disks and PCs are under your ownership and control.

SparkleShare is essentially a DropBox clone in terms of a GUI, which extends to recovering older versions with a right-click. It looks like DropBox, and it works like DropBox too. But it is just a scripted GIT environment. In fact if you already have a GIT Repo hosted on a server (or service) somewhere, SparkleShare is easily configured to wrk with it. Here's how you start from scratch, assuming you already have PGP keys shared with the server:

At the server, create a new, empty GIT repository:
git init --bare NEWREPOSITORY.git
At the workstation:

Normally, you might use something like the following commands to work with GIT. (these are not necessary if you use SparkleShare)

git clone ssh://user@example.com:port/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git
cd NEWREPOSITORY.git
git clone ssh://user@example.com:port/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git
The SparkleShare config:

Add Hosted Project...

Address:

ssh://user@example.com:port

Remote Path: /home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git

This document explains how to add a layer of encryption, (which also works to secure services like DropBox btw: https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Encrypting-your-files-before-transfer

Real Cloud

[PiSkyHi]

I did misread this. When I think cloud computing, I am coming for a CS point of view, which is that cloud computing is the terms used to describe the efforts to make scalability of software as a service ubiquitous. Basically, the cloud is not a bunch of servers, it is the infrastructure that provides scalable services to an application layer like the web. Amazon pretty much built the best cloud and others are following their lead. So, I have been looking at OpenStack
If anyone actually thinks this question is in any way relevant, please let me know if there are other resources.

Re:My experience: possibly eGroupWare or SOGo?

[jbolden]

I tried something like this last year using Linuxy solutions. For a midsized setup (30k users in groups ranging from about 30-500). For personal though I'm not sure it doesn't make more sense to just treat calendar and disk storage as two totally distinct problems and thus simplify the solution. Pick any of a dozen different internet calendar / scheduling services and do storage by itself.

But if you want to know the lay of the land as far as groupware:

1) I didn't go with Zimbra because at the time they were focused heavily on the rack server space and their longer term direction scared me. The cost per user was high for the commercial version and I did want commercial version features.

2) Scalix was really good 4-5 years ago. But is essentially now unmaintained. If you can live with broken compatibility and FireFox 3 for less than 10 users it is free. It has a very advanced calendar and an easy to use but powerful administration system. Really nice but I'd have a hard time going with a product that is now essentially dead.

3) OX (http://www.open-xchange.com/home.html) has what you are looking for. But understand that for whatever reason the app is not written MVC gui code is completely intermixed with functionality. It is effectively not much more changeable than a closed source program. They were working on this and by 2014 or so that likely will be fixed.

There were some others I experimented with if this is the sort of information you are looking for.

Re:cloud vs server

[AuMatar]

Servers are web 1.0. Cloud is web 3.0. Much buzzier and hipper.

git-annex assistant

[gottabeme]

This is what we are all waiting for, and it's already been funded! Just a matter of time until Joey finishes it: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own