[Freedombox-discuss] Home Alone Daemon

[alberto fuentes]

Hi freedombox enthusiasts!

You can get the source package here:
dget -x http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/h/homealoned/homealoned_0.4.1-1.dsc

You can get a binary here:
http://amazonis.lavakaquerie.com/homealoned_0.4.1-1_all.deb

request for sponsor can be found here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681685

To run a home server has its own set of drawbacks. One of them is that
no matter how percentage of the network you use for services, there
may be some peaks when somebody using your network needs full upload.
Also, I want my services to be completely unobtrusive and transparent
for the rest of the users of my lan network.

Since in a shared network I cant control who is going to be in need
nor i cant tune values on the fly, i decided to make use of the
network only when nobody else is using it.. Mostly at nights and at
some hours during the day.

homealoned allows you to detect those times and launch the appropriate
set of services, stopping them almost immediately when somebody starts
using the network again.

Ive been using a more basic version of this daemon for more than 2
months for my own purposes and i must say it works great for what is
intended to do.

Ive been using it with rtorrent and my plans include a tor relay and
some sync/backup scripts.

The idea of the backup/shared-archives is to set one dreamplug in each
house of my relatives and have a shared disk that syncs using this
daemon. In this way, you will upload/sync over the disk on your most
proximate disk (optimally, the one on your lan) and the info will
replicate to other disks over low network utilization times becoming
unobtrusive.

For the services I have been using a init.d script for rtorrent. I
dont know if I should include them as part of this daemon or try to
include them at the upstream packages i will be integrating... some
comment in this regard will be appreciated.

I know this pet project Its not as fancy as those security/privacy
programs that other are doing but I think is essential to have a
useful fredombox. I hope others find it useful as well.

greets!
aL