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Ask Slashdot: Building a Personal FOSS Cloud?

Posted by timothy on from the and-you-will-always-have-shade dept.

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?"

9 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks for sharing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So even if the host wanted to look at my data, all they'd see is 1s and 0s.

    That was the dumbest thing I read all day.

  2. I don't get it. by Nyder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OMFG, the cloud. I got to have or do the cloud. Magic Ponies in the cloud!!!!

    Seriously, wtf do you really need the cloud for? Is it going to magically sync all your different data together so you can access it all the time?

    No, seriously, do you think it's going to sync all your data so you can use it and access it anywhere?

    No, it's not. Sure, you can access you data anywhere, but duder, we've been doing that for a couple of decades now, way to join the late train.
    Unfortunately, the various corporations don't want to agree to standards, so having docs/apps/whatever working with everything isn't in the "rape as much money as we can" business plan. so nothing is going to change.

    Now let's look at the Megaupload thingy. That was cloud storage, file lockers. It's not around now, is it? That is what happens to clouds, the winds blow them away. The wind? Oh ya, in this case, that's the good old USA Government, working for their Pimps, the Music/Movie Industry. You think that can't happen to any "cloud" servers? Think again. OMG, Terrorist used that server, Child porn was on that server, boom! You're data, which has nothing to do with those 2 things, is gone also. Hope you make a backup. Oh, wait, the cloud was magically supposed to back it up for you?

    Cloud has been around for awhile, but we called it what it was, the internet.

     

    --
    Be seeing you...
    1. Re:I don't get it. by The+Mighty+Buzzard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh give the guy a break. This is exactly the situation the "the cloud" buzzword was created for: people who are scared of the phrase "file server". There is absolutely nothing new about "the cloud" in any way but it's a nice fluffy word that people are comfortable with and it's acceptable to not have any idea what it actually is. I'd change the hostname of my home server to thecloud just for wiseassery's sake if it wouldn't hose my Trek shipname naming scheme.

      --
      Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
  3. SSH not good enough for you? by siddesu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What's in the cloud that is better?

    1. Re:SSH not good enough for you? by NormalVisual · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Hardware redundancy is the big one. Your server runs as an abstracted VM in a management framework (XenServer, VMWare, etc.) that allows it to be instantly migrated to another machine with no interruptions/downtime if there are problems with the physical hardware it's running on. If you'd been running a real server instead of a cloud-based VM, you'd be down until that server could be fixed.

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
  4. Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives by jcreus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's open source! You either: a) send them a bug report, or b) download it, and change the code to whatever you want.

  5. Re:Africa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yea, those poverty-stricken, starving kids in Africa should keep their aircraft carriers, long-range bomber aircraft and unmanned drone fleets in their own fucking country!

  6. Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A solution to this problem is to use a proxy that removes the Referrer header.

    Personally, I use a proxy that removes all headers except 'Host', unless a site absolutely needs it. For a few sites I need to enable 'Cookie' for example.

    In addition, you could configure the proxy to only get files from googleapis once and cache it in the proxy.

    Posting anonymously since I was never here.

  7. Personal Cloud Can't Exist, By Definition by jon3k · · Score: 3, Insightful
    "Personal Cloud" is a misnomer, at best.

    Using the wikipedia definition:

    "Cloud computing is the delivery of computing and storage capacity [1] as a service [2] to a community of end-recipients.".

    The whole point of a cloud is to abstract a massive underlying infrastructure to deliver some type of computing service (PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, etc ad naseum) to a large group of users and to be able to scale that infrastructure seamlessly. A "personal cloud" is an oxymoron.