[p2p-research] personal server technology

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:45:57AM -0700, Matt Boggs wrote:
> Now here's something I know a bit about...
> I had the luck 10 years ago to have very fast internet and a block of IP
> addresses in my personal loft live\work space. There was none of the cloud

I studiouly try to avoid using the cringe-indusing terms cloud computing 
or Web 2.0 myself.

> computing services offered at that time except for web-mail. As a computer
> consultant and tinkerer, I had a full rack of computers and several

You did operate a 19" rack in your living space? Wasn't that a bit
on the noisy side? The only semi-silent racks are full of musical
gear.

> scattered around that were dedicated to things like music on my stereo and
> movies on my projector. Later, friends would want me to share them and the
> best thing available was FTP. The only streaming at the time was Shoutcast

ftp is still de rigeur in hardcore filesharing circles.

> for music, which I had set up as well. As for getting music\video from
> others, my options were again FTP or newsgroups (now referred to as the

Usenet alt.binaries is still seeing lots of use.

> 'Undernet'). Fast forward to 2010: The problems facing what Stephen Downes
> suggest are as follows: first and foremost: Hardware\software failure. Your

That's what high availability and failover are there for. In
case of p2p high availability there's very little complexity.

> personal server (PS) would need a hefty but not unreasonable system
> requirement to compete with the ease of the 'cloud services'.  A PS needs

The problem is putting trust in the service provider, and also
in the availability of your data. It's a no-brainer that your
provider will snoop you out and rat on you, and that there's no
accountability is case of total loss of data, or even transient
unavailability (even it's a commercial service).

> maintenance, sure, Microsoft has been working on a home PS for some time,
> but, there are still lots of ways bad things can hurt your PS from the

Home NAS appliances do all these things for you. You can of course
roll your own, using FreeNAS, OpenFiler, and EON Storage.

> outside if you don't maintain it. And lastly, people. The common man wants a
> fuss free box they can simply plug in and out without a thought. Until
> hardware prices come down and software becomes more self-aware, I don't see

Admittedly a decent (=fast) NAS will set you back around 600 EUR sans drives.
But baseline NAS (PogoPlug) starts at around 100 EUR. Slow but usable
NAS is around 300 EUR.

> a mass PS revolution. Add to that the ISPs will not be happy with all that
> bandwidth moving about without any additional revenue from dedicated pipes.

We've got already people trying to evade deep packet inspection and Layer 7
traffic throttline, playing cat and mouse with the cheap providers (the
decent kind charge enough/provide decent data plans so that throttling
is unnecessary).

> Lastly, how would you index the information ? without an index, we go back
> to the really old days of BBS and word of mouth. The PS for the home is not

I think it's a reality for many people already. Home NAS is a booming
market. 

> an outlandish wish though, perhaps in 10 years if there is still an internet
> as we know it.

There will be still the Internet as we know it, and even if I have to
roll my own. I run my own "cloud" (uck, ptui), have my own networks,
my ISP is nothing but a (hostile, untrusted) transport layer.
 
> Final thought: a peer based internet using an ISP backbone is certainly

You can do very decent meshes with Level 3 switches and FTTC/FTTH. The
reason it's not being done is mostly because policy is easier to roll
out to the network core. 

> possible and has been for a long time. Not only for sharing information but
> for sharing memory and CPU cycles to tackle complex calculations or 3D

You've got accounting and trust issues. You can't really sandbox code.
Because there's no p2p online currency (despite BitCoin & Co) there's no
way to cash in on services rendered to the community.

> rendering. In addition, Peer based internet has other applications such as
> TOR (for annoniminity). VOIP hardening (Skype uses this) and bit torrent

Skype is a corporation, hence not really p2p. 

> style secure backups where everyone has a piece of the backup so that if

Check out Tahoe.

> chunks get lost, the swarm can regenerate the whole. I just feel it is still
> in the realm of geeks at this time...still :-)

Geeks are always 10-20 years ahead of the mainstream. As Gibson said, the 
future's here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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