Ask Slashdot: Building a Personal FOSS Cloud?

An anonymous reader writes "Cloud-based personal data management is pretty cool... if you don't mind entrusting the entirety of your personal data to a gigantic corporation. Apart from the risks of their doing unseemly things with your data, also the security of your data is entirely in their unreliable hands. So, is it possible to build my own personal data repository, where for example, I can store my contacts and calendars to sync to multiple devices? This could be hosted on any third party hosting service assuming also that all of my data was encrypted at the data level. So even if the host wanted to look at my data, all they'd see is 1s and 0s. What are the options for the tinfoil hat wearing FOSS folks that want to participate in the cloud age?"

cloud vs server

[O('_')O_Bush]

At what point does this involve a cloud? Renting a server(providing ftp, for example) is easy, and doesn't require anything from the "cloud age".

Also, building a server or buying one secondhand is cheap, if you want to DIY.

Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[SomePgmr]

Or use any of the usual storage services that provide a client to maintain a sync'd mount point, and just secure the contents. Jungledisk will do this for you for Amazon or Rackspace backed storage. Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. can be used with your own encryption mechanism.

For bonus redundancy, sync the local cache to an external USB drive so you don't get caught with your pants down if one of those services botches your remote store.

Re:cloud vs server

[ganjadude]

I was wondering the same, when I first read the headline I had visions of friends setting up partitions on each others hard drives and do cloud storage between mom,dad,sister,brother,grandparents,friends

redundancy for family photos for instance on all family computers for instance. obviously private storage as well. the odds of all computers going down at once in multiple locations is highly unlikely. p

I have the above, and it's not a cloud

[thegarbz]

You want the above? That's easy. Access to email from anywhere, access to my contacts and my calendar, how about access to all my files? Yep got that. Though it doesn't have a fancy name like "cloud". If I were into marketing I'd call it a cloud, but right now I'll stick to calling it an "internet facing linux machine"

Yeah it's not as exciting, but it does everything the so called cloud has done and it has done it for many years before this mythical cloud has existed. My phone sees the same set of files and emails as my home desktop PC, and there's a web interface to access all the above too.

Seriously just google "Linux Groupware" and maybe "Linux Web Fileserver" and you'll have everything that the cloud has.

My experience: possibly eGroupWare or SOGo?

[Anonymous Coward]

*snort* 27 posts so far and no one seems to really have addressed the poster's real question. (Instead, all I've read is basic suggestions like a file share, VNC/SSH, or OpenStack; all of which seem to ignore the main point: "is it possible to build my own personal data repository, where for example, I can store my contacts and calendars to sync to multiple devices?")

I've been looking for something like this for a while now, actually. From my research, I think the best way to solve this problem is to set up your own 'groupware' server on a hosted VM somewhere. You can custom-configure the VM to make sure that it stores your server-side data in an encrypted filesystem within the VM itself. [To make it that much harder for anyone from your hosting company to spy on you, naturally... ;-) ]

Then, you can use the open-source sync clients from the "Funambol" project to synchronize the contacts and calendar data on the phone with the data on the groupware server. The issue I've had is that I *also* want a non-shitty *Web* interface for calendar management... and so far, *that* has been hard to find. (I can't bring my personal smartphone into work, so I need something to be able to manage my calendar over the Internet and sync those appointments back to my phone).

So what server to use? Well, I set up an eGroupWare server a few years ago (before all this shit was called "cloud" everything :-P) and it seemed to have most of the features I wanted as far as calendar management goes. [I even locked everything down, moving the back-end database to an encrypted filesystem that wasn't auto-mounted...] Unfortunately, the default web interface kinda sucked. And the good Funambol 'web' client is only available on their own 3rd-party calendar hosting servers, which I wouldn't use because I wouldn't get to control my own data. (Again, the project only ships with a crappy text-based one out of the box :-P) So I stopped using that solution. Consequently, I never actually got all the way to the point of trying out the PalmOS(which I was using at the time)/Android/iOS Funambol clients to see how well they worked to synchronize contacts and calendar data.

Recently, I've been looking at SOGo, another open-source groupware server which apparently has a fancy Ajax-based web UI... and should also work with the Funambol open-source sync clients for all the major mobile OS devices. I haven't set it up yet, though.

Incidentally, I'd be *very* interested to hear from anyone else who's attempted to set up similar solutions about your problems and successes. Has anyone else actually tried this?