[Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox experiment & Sister project

Charles N Wyble charles at knownelement.com
Wed Jun 15 04:59:17 UTC 2011


On 06/14/2011 10:20 PM, Sébastien Lerique wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
Hello. Welcome to the discussion. :)

>
>   Point 1:
>
> Since the beginning of 2011 I have been working on my own server (now a
> "freedombox playground"), aiming to provide services to friends and
> family.

Excellent. https://wiki.mehho.net/Mehho/GettingStarted are the services
you consider stable? Do you have any others planned / in testing? In
particular
I'm curious what social networking software people are playing with. How
much federated interoperability can we start playing with? Are the
social software
packages (appleseed/dispoara etc) stable enough for every day use?
Should we start doing system level testing and see how they interop?

>  For more info, see the main page[1], the development wiki[2], or
> the description of currently available services[3]. The approach seems
> similar to what Bob Mottram is doing (although for the moment it is
> Ubuntu Server 10.10, on a desktop tower, with 640Go HDD). My current
> goal really is about testing various candidates for services and finding
> what suits best (based on interface, integration, etc.). I haven't
> focused on hardware, or "perfect" security, yet. Just for the info.
>

Yes this is a good idea. I plan to send an e-mail to the list in a
couple weeks when I've got
http://wiki.knownelement.com/index.php?title=Data_Ownership completely
finished. Couple sub pages I need to flesh out and more documentation is
needed. I've been running my own services/owning my data for about 18
months now.

>   Point 2:
>
> Running that server, it appeared to me that standard DSL link
> reliability is quite an issue.

It certainly can be. Especially the dirt cheap plans offered by the
telco providers in the USA. I paid 110.00 a month for static ip/no
filters/business class DSL in Los Angeles CA. I now run everything on a
VPS at my $dayjob for ~50.00 a month.

>  First it can be very unstable, and
> secondly having an asymmetrical bandwidth makes sharing of photos (and
> other potentially large files) quite slow; and of course it can't
> support an occasional slashdotting.

Yeah. Some degree of mitigation is available (rate limiting, caching
etc) but if you get hit with enough bandwidth saturation, you are in
trouble.

>  I think it is an important problem
> -- I wouldn't want my blog or social networking account to be off-line
> every now and then. A solution I see to it, though maybe partial, would
> be taking advantage of the fact that many boxes would be in that same
> situation, and developing a way to distribute service-providing between
> boxes owned by friends (some sort of mix between P2P and CDN). At this
> point it is still very vague.

I agree 100%. Would love to see a fully user owned/operated CDN. That
would be awesome.

Very cool stuff. Please keep us informed.

I'm busy getting my stack fully deployed and documented and will send an
announcement e-mail in a couple of weeks.





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