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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.
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.
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."