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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"
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.
Is officially under construction. Once a few of these get owned it will be quick before they're all compromised.
I agree. I mean, Linux runs the majority of web servers. Just look at THAT giant botnet. Best use MS IIS server, on Surface RT -- No one's doing that so it's far safer.
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.
I recently bought a raspberry Pi with the idea of hosting a web server from home using a Huawei Dongle and the cell phone network. Due to the power wastage, I didn't think it a good idea to use my regular PC for the job.
First you obviously need to get the Huawei Dongle working with wvdial or something similar. This took me perhaps a week.
Then you need to contact your cell phone service provider and ask for an unrestricted APN otherwise they block all connections to your dongle. This took some paperwork, but I managed to get it done.
Once incoming connections are allowed, you can start hosting your website. The first proper request to my website activated the dongle's maximum power usage and this resulted in a power brown-out and the PI crashed. After upping the power supply from 700 mA to 1000 mA, this problem was solved.
NOIP and dyndns solved my dns problems easily.
The last problem I haven't solved yet is routing to my Pi with the cell phone networks. About 10% of the time, it finds a route, but the rest of the time it only finds the IP address. I will buy another sim card and see if it improves my situation, but in the mean time I've resorted to Amazon's cloud offering.
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.
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By "appropriate" do you mean, "one that Comcast deems appropriate" or one that is technically appropriate?
Believe it or not, there was a time, before ownership of the internet was turned over to the big telecoms, when you could host whatever kind of service you wanted on your internet connection. Back when there were these things called "ISPs" that you paid and they gave you bandwidth and that was pretty much the end of it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.)
It depends on criteria and perspective.
You mean, "Ask your telecom for a business account", don't you? Are there still such thing as "ISPs"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.