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ArkOS: Building the Anti-Cloud (on a Raspberry Pi)
angry tapir writes "arkOS is a Linux distribution that runs on the Raspberry Pi. It's an initiative of the CitizenWeb Project, which promotes decentralization and democratization of the Internet. arkOS is aiming to aid this effort by making it super-simple for people to host their own email, blogs, storage and other services from their own home, instead of relying on cloud services run by third parties. about the project."
I imagine Comcast will have something to say about this - something like "No more internet for you, TOS-breaker"
Is officially under construction. Once a few of these get owned it will be quick before they're all compromised.
I'm running my own server for mail, my web site, and various other little bits.
Not running from home: bandwidth is a primary issue, especially my uplink is too slow. My host has at least some 100 Mbit for me, maybe more - shared of course with many other sites but it's there for those bursts, so the few people daily that visit my site have a quick response.
Other concerns are dynamic IP (will need dynDNS, not sure how well that works), uptime, power use, hardware management... I pay some USD 350 a year for my virtual server. All in. Fixed IP, fast hardware, fast bandwidth, reliable connection - more reliable than from home with our over-sensitive RCD. More than enough for a small setup, a couple dozen mails a day, a dozen or so web site visitors a day. Not going to run that from home: more work, more cost, more trouble.
Does it include super-simple backup software, or does your personal anti-cloud go *poof!* when the hardware fails?
We could decentralize and democratize the protocol standards as well.
...and still no decentralized search engine. I wonder if projects like Yacy will ever take off?
Dr P Linux will hopefully be out by the end of the year ... :)
Spent All My Mod Points
Too many people these days live behind NATs, and that basically prevents any initiative like this from taking off. Perhaps the day IPv6 becomes common may see this actually work reasonably.
It should come with I2P like TAILS does:
I2P-Bote: Decentralized / anonymized email based on DHT
Tahoe-LAFS on I2P: Decentralized and anonymous file storage
Syndie on I2P: Decentralized and anon blog
and
I2P itself: A general replacement for IP. Like a cross between Tor and bittorrent, where everyone is expected to contibute to bandwidth and so reduce the centralization (and opportunity for attacks) as much as possible and expand the approved uses to anything (instead of just web browsing).
Take away the centralized power of the ISP and government to monitor and control every aspect of your online life.
What a fascinating idea. Anyone remember FrontPage Express??? :-D
Depending on what it is doing one of the issues your going to have is bandwidth and latency problems. Up-time is also a problem. It is highly unlikely you can keep up a home server with any kind of reasonable up-time. Lets assume these problems can be solved though. Maybe you fall back to a non-home server for email as an example and you work around the filtering issues by way of VPN. Then you might have a slightly better solution.
Last problem I have with this solution is the Raspberry Pi. It's crap. Both from a reliability and quality perspective. However I'd also be concerned because it is not free software friendly by a long shot. To even boot the system your dependent on non-free graphics.
There is also the freedombox. I don't know how much of a better job they do or if they've done any better. However I'd probably look into it first.
Until there's widespread FTTP (GPON or AON) it will be more pain than it's worth.
I have run a Linux server for years with just these services on ADSL & ADSL2. Mail is fine, even a Jabber server is fine, even private file hosting is ok, if a bit slow, but once you start hosting websites your ability to actually use your own Internet when you're home is diminished.
I was hoping that the National Broadband Network (NBN) would stay 93% FTTP here in Australia, but unfortunately with the change in government that's looking less & less likely.
Posting since I'm sure nobody else has heard of an RCD either.
Can't believe I only discovered this project today, when it's been running, it seems, for at least 6 months. Anyway, it seems very similar to what I just proposed, the percloud http:per-cloud.com With the difference, if I'm not mistaken, that the percloud would be an easier to use, preconfigured, locked down version of arkOS. Am I right?
I've been thinking about setting up a home server for some time now, but then I took a step back and think about what I really wanted to achieve. What I really would like (I'm not on facebook) is a simple way to share information with my family (who lives all over the country) and friends. And I'd prefer it not be hosted on the internet or with a company that makes money of my information.
:)
Just a simple way to share information with a select few people.
A full fledge home server would be overkill, and it would have to serve as a host to others in my family also. That would be too much work. But a raspberry pi in each home, working as something inbetween a home server and just a vpn with some bells and whistles might do the trick.
Maybe it's time to start coding something at home again
Open access to the internet entails being able to offer services just as much as being able to use them. By prohibiting users to run their own services they are violating net neutrality. When is the class action suit coming?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Looks like a brilliant project -- lots of people have talked about doing this for a while, great to see it being done.
Some features we talked about in the pub that would be useful to have:
-- distributed, trust-based automatic backups, all your stuff mirrored on your real-world freinds' similar boxes and vice versa
-- own diaposra pod set up by default, and set up to mirror your and your friends' stuff as above
-- personal web page and wiki set up by default
-- Yacy open source distrubted search engine running by default
-- some clever way to redirect your website, wiki and emails to friend's servers when your Pi is down
anyone know how far ArkOS has got with these ?
The TOS for Google Fiber says NO SERVERS... at all. Kind of lame when you consider they initially called Google Fiber an experiment to see what people would do with all that bandwidth. This sounds ideal. Google Fiber will be available to me very soon, but I may just have to pass it up. I don't like that they have already drastically changed the game by excluding servers.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Great copy paste job boys :)
even in an easy-to-use setup...
The (no longer developed and EOLd) 602 LAN Suite for Windows did pretty much all that, and more, a decade ago... it was kinda ahead of its time, I guess, and there really hasn't been anything available that's truly comparable, since it was dropped by its developer.
To me, it seems that providers that prohibit home servers (either by TOS or by actually blocking e.g. port 80) are in violation of FCC-10-201 (net neutrality).
This was brought up before on Slashdot http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/30/2322253/google-argues-against-net-neutrality with specific reference to Google Fiber's TOS prohibition of incoming ports. The complaint is described in http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf . I wish someone would pursue this against all major providers, not just Google Fiber.
There is simply no valid reason to prohibit incoming ports. This issue is not bandwidth - most home servers use far less than say streaming video. In any case if it's abused, the providers can use their existing procedures to deal with bandwidth abusers.
This is really at the heart of network neutrality. The only reason I can see for prohibiting incoming ports is to prevent individuals from competing with commercial interests that provide network services. Personally, it really PO's me that my ISP blocks ports 80 and 443. I keep my files on a home server, and although I can access them via ssh, many public wifi services (e.g. at hospitals) block every port, in and out, except 80 and 443. I can't really complain about the public wifi (well, I can complain, but they'll just tell me that it's a free courtesy they're under no obligation to provide, so if you don't like it, don't use it). So, to access my personal files, I need to use a 3rd party's commercial server (cloud or VPN) that allows port 80.
(As for the dynamic DNS, that hasn't been a serious problem for me - my ISP keeps it fixed as long as my cable modem is powered and connected, and the IP only changes when I restart the cable modem. Anyway, that is a secondary and minor problem.)
You mean I can run a server out of my home?! That's amazing!
How is this easier than spinning up a TurnkeyLinux appliance on an old Pentium 4 (or better) desktop you can get for free in almost any part of the country?
Let's see - I need to buy the RaspberryPi, a case, and a power brick at a (practical) minimum, which puts the system in the $75+ range - compared to a repurposed desktop that will cost around $0. Of course, the difference is in the monthly power bill - the old Pentium 4 desktop will use much more power. You could avoid that expense by running your appliances under, say, VirtualBox if you normally keep your desktop on 24x7....
Oh yeah, the TOS of most ISPs would preclude any server type work on a residential account, at least that is the case here in the US.
Ken
When did people not have the opportunity to host their own content?
For anybody that has ever hosted their own email server, Raspberry Pi is NOT the right platform to do this on. While you can easily set up an email server on any Linux distro, the reality is that you need something a little bit more powerful than Raspberry Pi to process the ten's of thousands of spam messages a minute you are going to get. And don't think that just because you are "clever" enough to set up your own email server that you will be immune to spam.
And it seems a lot the the Slashdot denizens seem to have forgotten the bygone era of the "Slashdot Effect", when people and companies used to try and host their own websites which couldn't handle a sudden influx of people that used the RTFA. Even a lot of corporate servers couldn't handle when hundreds of thousands of people suddenly jumped onto their websites all at once back in the day. This is why many corporations and consumers just started using hosted services which have a larger, dynamically scalable infrastructure to handle sudden jumps in traffic.
Finally, with things like Facebook and Twitter and a slew of other social networking services, these all but decimated the "personal blog". Nobody cares to go to www.myblog.com and read some mindless ranting from a conspiracy nut. The problem with "decentralization" is that you will be lost in obscurity.
So, aside from hosting anything more than a hobby website for friends and family to touch base with, good luck.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I like the disclaimer on the arkOS site:
Warning – arkOS and Genesis are still in development. Many tools are not yet working, and you should not yet depend on arkOS for anything other than testing at this time. Please stay connected via one of the methods listed on the Contact page to get updates on project development.
I get that we're all busy frolicking with our Raspberry Pis, but any Linux distro on an old PC will do this. There's nothing "Pi" about this. You don't need a new distro for this either. Maybe a handful of shell scripts or some kind of GUI to manage all the bits and pieces would be nice, but this is all a solved problem.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Why not just make your servers available on an as-needed basis? If you have a router between your server and the 'net, the router would have to have some open ports, say 53020-53030. I don't see any rules against having open ports if there's nothing going on with them. And with port knocking, that's how it would look to your ISP. If you replaced your router with a full linux box, you wouldn't even need open ports. Knockd listens on closed ports.
That's the biggest load of bull I've heard in a while. The Internet is not a democracy. Giving everyone an applicance server doesn't make it one. Back in the very early nineties, when a few of us were shutting down our BBS' and jumping on the internet, the whole excitement and joy of the internet was the fact that it was NOT a democracy. Besides, Linux appliance servers are old news. Facebook made it 'super simple' for every cess pool moron to become part of the net. The last thing we need is "Busch" and "Budweiser" enhanced websites from every pink sheeple out there.
Simple is such a relative term, but super-simple must include everyone...
This sounds like the same concept that the Freedom Box Foundation has been working on for a while. It would seem like a better use of resources for these groups to get together and pool their efforts rather than do the same thing twice.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Given the hoopla created by Yahoo groups last month this could be a solution for those wanting to bail Yahoo groups.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT