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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?"
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.
http://owncloud.org/
- Calendar
- Contacts
- dropbox like storage
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
At what point does this involve a cloud? Renting a server(providing ftp, for example) is easy, and doesn't require anything from the "cloud age".
Also, building a server or buying one secondhand is cheap, if you want to DIY.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
You can write "The Cloud" on it with a Sharpie if you absolutely must.
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.
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...
What's in the cloud that is better?
slashdot ate my last comment, so just check out the link
coding is life
the safest storage is your own high speed server quality RAID 7 write-only drive
...omphaloskepsis often...
You want the above? That's easy. Access to email from anywhere, access to my contacts and my calendar, how about access to all my files? Yep got that. Though it doesn't have a fancy name like "cloud". If I were into marketing I'd call it a cloud, but right now I'll stick to calling it an "internet facing linux machine"
Yeah it's not as exciting, but it does everything the so called cloud has done and it has done it for many years before this mythical cloud has existed. My phone sees the same set of files and emails as my home desktop PC, and there's a web interface to access all the above too.
Seriously just google "Linux Groupware" and maybe "Linux Web Fileserver" and you'll have everything that the cloud has.
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
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
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.
*snort* 27 posts so far and no one seems to really have addressed the poster's real question. (Instead, all I've read is basic suggestions like a file share, VNC/SSH, or OpenStack; all of which seem to ignore the main point: "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?")
I've been looking for something like this for a while now, actually. From my research, I think the best way to solve this problem is to set up your own 'groupware' server on a hosted VM somewhere. You can custom-configure the VM to make sure that it stores your server-side data in an encrypted filesystem within the VM itself. [To make it that much harder for anyone from your hosting company to spy on you, naturally... ;-) ]
Then, you can use the open-source sync clients from the "Funambol" project to synchronize the contacts and calendar data on the phone with the data on the groupware server. The issue I've had is that I *also* want a non-shitty *Web* interface for calendar management... and so far, *that* has been hard to find. (I can't bring my personal smartphone into work, so I need something to be able to manage my calendar over the Internet and sync those appointments back to my phone).
So what server to use? Well, I set up an eGroupWare server a few years ago (before all this shit was called "cloud" everything :-P) and it seemed to have most of the features I wanted as far as calendar management goes. [I even locked everything down, moving the back-end database to an encrypted filesystem that wasn't auto-mounted...] Unfortunately, the default web interface kinda sucked. And the good Funambol 'web' client is only available on their own 3rd-party calendar hosting servers, which I wouldn't use because I wouldn't get to control my own data. (Again, the project only ships with a crappy text-based one out of the box :-P) So I stopped using that solution. Consequently, I never actually got all the way to the point of trying out the PalmOS(which I was using at the time)/Android/iOS Funambol clients to see how well they worked to synchronize contacts and calendar data.
Recently, I've been looking at SOGo, another open-source groupware server which apparently has a fancy Ajax-based web UI... and should also work with the Funambol open-source sync clients for all the major mobile OS devices. I haven't set it up yet, though.
Incidentally, I'd be *very* interested to hear from anyone else who's attempted to set up similar solutions about your problems and successes. Has anyone else actually tried this?
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!
I think he was talking about their population/resource imbalance.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."