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Comment by mamon | Hacker News Reader

I have a dream: I would like to have all the "cloud" services: Gmail, Dropbox, Google Docs, online photo gallery, video streaming, etc. And I would like to have them as downloadable software packages, so that I could buy my own domain, set up my MacMini as a server and have all of the above services hosted on the server I own and have full controll of. Do you think that's possible to do ?

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There are some steps in that direction. Two projects I know of:

- https://sandstorm.io/

- http://maidsafe.net/

I think I've seen some other projects but forgot to bookmark them (or maybe I did but forgot to tag the bookmark...). Sorry.

Added: sadly, all those projects are about software packaging with a single-click installers. I haven't ever seen a project that'd strive to have installation and configuration recipes written in some configuration management language using literate programming techniques, so the recipe would act not as a mere set of instructions to the machine, but - primarily - as an article to the user, explaining what's going on, why it's so and where to tweak the knobs. Like those "set up your own server" blog posts on steroids, and with a "not interested in details, just do this" button slapped at the top.

I would add Cozy Cloud : https://cozy.io/en/

FreedomBox is another.

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

Still very alpha, but promising.

This would truly be a great thing. I've been trying for years, and it's really kind of painful, even with some good working knowledge of network infrastructure.

Here are some decent software I use. Not all OSS, unfortunately, but they still let me posses my data.

- Subsonic (music) http://subsonic.org/

- OwnCloud (files) https://owncloud.org/

- BitSync (files, begrudgingly) http://www.bittorrent.com/

- Apple Server (webserver/VPN/SSH)

- Lots of nice blog/web serving software once you get the web stack up and running.

Email's rough. Photos are also rough between either thumbnailing/cacheing all your photos, or multi-second processing.

There's open source software to do all of that, and it is relatively simple to setup. However, you will soon find that the real nightmare is in maintaining all the services. With paid for, or google hosted, services you set it and forget it.

It's also much more expensive to roll your own. That said there is a nerd-cred factor that had me set up owncloud on my personal domain. It's definitely a nuisance though hosting your own stuff.

You'd basically need to start[1] an equivalent movement to the GNU/FOSS/Linux movement, for cloud software.

Google's services, at least, are written assuming they are running on a million machines inside of a Google datacenter, with all sorts of dependencies on the infrastructure; worse (for the purposes of converting them to easy-to-install packages), they are written assuming the existence of Google SREs.

Everyone else is in the same boat, with software meant to be run on a datacenter and not a MacMini. You'd really need to start over from scratch, and first with a platform that can run on one to a million machines, then rewriting everything to run on top of it.

It's not impossible, but it's a lot of work.

[1] Such a movement probably already exists, in which case you should join it.

> You'd basically need to start[1] an equivalent movement to the GNU/FOSS/Linux movement, for cloud software.

Could you point out what in any of these services actually depends on the cloud?

Email runs perfectly fine on single servers (Gmail). Network file storage is a solved problem (Dropbox/Google Drive/YouTube/various photo buckets). What these things are missing are dynamic web 2.0 GUIs, not backends. And the GUI doesn't have anything to do with the cloud.

The cloud is a huge innovation, but it isn't an innovation that provides anything for us, it's an innovation for centralized businesses. The cloud has absolutely no value until you're trying to serve millions of users on one service. Federated systems like email are perfectly capable of handling everything that the cloud does for you and I.

We don't need the cloud.

But the cloud does provide value to me. I can spend a few bucks and a few minutes to set up Google Apps for email on my domain. It takes hours of futzing to configure a home email server. My time is valuable, so the cloud service is worth it.

I'd love to have a comparable platform that I could run from my closet, but that's still in the distance. For now, cloud services are usually the best way to minimize cost.

> I can spend a few bucks and a few minutes to set up Google Apps for email on my domain.

This is a perfect example of what I'm saying: this has nothing to do with the cloud, and everything to do with the tooling Google Apps provides. There's nothing preventing the open source community from implementing equivalent tooling which targets federated servers.

I have a FreeNAS server set up at home for most of those services. It's a FreeBSD based distribution focused on file services, but you can really run any service from the BSD jail system. FreeNAS comes with click'n run plugins for a lot of the services mentioned in this thread: ownCloud (files), firefly (music), btSync (files), Plex (video/music), Subsonic (music) and more.

Now a Mac Mini isn't the most fearsome server, so you won't get extraordinary performance, but it should perform good enough for for 1-2 concurrent users.

I have been working on, and using Portal to self-host my own "cloud" services at my domain (jeff393.com), to replace Google and other services.

https://portalplatform.net

This is what I'm running now:

- Files (Syncthing)

- Email (Mail Server + Thunderbird / Evolution)

- Chat (XMPP/Jabber + Weechat)

- VPN (OpenVPN)

- Blog (Ghost + Telescope)

- Etherpad (document creation / collaboration)

- Mumble (voice chat)

- Tor (privacy)

See the (open source) OX app suite: https://www.open-xchange.com/en/ox-app-suite

https://mailbox.org/en also provides a (very reasonably priced) hosted version of OX

Currently the business model of many of these services relies on your personal data. By earning less money to solve the problem is not an option to them. I mean even some paid services will use your data for profit. So I think it won't be possible to find a full alternative of each of those services in the near future. There are plenty of opensource self-hosting software like others mentioned. They are not as good as those cloud services in many ways, but at least many of them were designed to respect your personal data and freedom. We have to weigh the balance until there's a better solution.

This actually makes a lot more sense that it did a decade ago. Mail servers were needed in a time when we were not always online. Now that we are, we can technically run everything that's done by a server on our own PCs. The bandwidth and processing power now exists. The resulting setup would be a peer to peer network with nodes connected via address/name servers.

For those times we're offline, it may be possible to spin up a temporary cloud instance which downloads everything back to us and dies once we reconnect.

The only question that remains, then, is backup.

OwnCloud covers most of that. What it doesn't, someone is working on.

At least as a start, set up an e-mail and XMPP/Jabber account with a provider with whom you can use your own domain. That way you can own your own identity while still intercommunicating with others. Should the need arise to change providers, you can do so without sacrificing your network.

Of course Google et al. are working tirelessly to make this not possible (see Hangouts, FB Messenger, etc... all once federated XMPP services, now closed-garden proprietary services).

> [...] set up my MacMini as a server and have all of the above services hosted on the server I own and have full controll of. Do you think that's possible to do?

Unfortunately, that is not (fully) possible. Consumer internet landlines traditionally have an upload speed that is 10x slower than the download speed. Hence you will never get the same performance as a data-center hosted solution.

But you don't really need that much bandwidth for all of these services. Dropbox's bandwidth would be the hardest to replicate - but even then, in general, once you get your first backup done, updates shouldn't require that much bandwidth. Music streaming works fine. Photos bottleneck is almost more processing power than bandwidth. Streaming video might be slow, but downloading, then watching usually is good enough for one's own videos shared with friends.

And bandwidth, like HD space, is always increasing.

There are also some "commercial" symetrical links, meant mainly for small companies. They cost 2-5 times more than a normal, consumer-grade link, but I wouldn't mind paying that extra for the possibility of keeping my data safe.

Absolutely and it's quite simple: Synology NAS.

It can run OwnCloud, Docker etc and already has iOS/Android apps for photos, docs, notes, media streaming.

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