[p2p-research] What should a Community do with Profit? (was: personal server technology)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 09:22:26PM +0100, M. Fioretti wrote:

> Unfortunately, I have no *direct* experience of any such ISP, so I

Does community-owned include the last mile infrastructure? I'm aware
of nonprofit-deployed ISPs, which includes the last mile. But municipally
owned infrastructure appears to be a much better match altogether.

> can't help you when it comes to price/cost details, but they do exist.
> Two I have met online are Ninux, see http://stop.zona-m.net/node/47,
> and the Catalonia WCN linked from that article. More exactly, Ninux is
> still in the amateur/hacking phase, but WCN is already a reality, so
> you should contact them directly to see *if* and how they fit with
> your definition of community owned, and how their costs work.

Municipally owned infrastructure makes a lot of sense, actually.
 
> > > The only problem today is that most VPS offers are sized for big
> > > websites, not for this kind of needs.
> > 
> > Could these be community owned?
> 
> Maybe I must introduce a bit of terminology here, in order to
> answer. A professional, reliable datacenter is a big, big room with

The question is why an ISP needs centralized infrastructure. FTTC
infrastructure is distributed to every street corner, and contains
fiber drops/DSLAM in ventilated metal boxes on every street corner. 
In principle there's no reason why you could
completely dispense with central infrastructure altogether.

> state of the art air conditioning, redundant power supply and internet
> backbone connections, fire alarm... and 24/7 onsite professionals to

The backbone thing is also a bit of a dated metaphor. If you deploy
GBit Ethernet mesh which is municipally owned and connect this by
intercity fiber there's no centralized backbone. It's a bit like a
federal railway (I realize not many in the US are aware that such
do exist), only much less expensive. Actually, frequently fiber
and rail go together.

> keep it running, replace faulty hw components asap etc... Inside those

Redundant networks (meshes qualify) degrade gracefully, so there's
no need to rush out for repairs.

> big rooms there are tenths or hundreds of racks, each carrying tenths
> of special computers. "special" means "made with higher quality parts,
> and shaped to be packed as densely as possible".

Again, that one absolutely needs carrier-quality systems in centralized
settings strikes me as oldthink. Of course this is how things are still
done today, mostly, but there's no law why this must remain that way.

Actually, I'm wrong, there's a law, only not of the natural variety.
It's typically about laws of accounting, and traffic management, and 
lawful interception.
 
> A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a virtual computer, that is a purely
> software environment remotely accessible, which "looks" and works like
> a normal computer. Companies set up a datacenter as above, then
> partition each of the physical microprocessors in those special
> computers to work as N different, totally independent VPSs and then
> "rent" each of them to a different customer. The customer can run
> inside the VPS any software he or she wants, including web servers,
> email servers, whatever.

That does currently make sense for current settings, but arguably
embeddeds at the edge of the network can take up that slack. The
only reason for a virtual server is energy efficiency, professional
operators and it being close to the network core/backbone. If
there's no backbone, the thing is highly reliable, zero-admin 
and redundant/can do failover to the other nodes in the network
virtual servers lose a lot of their lustre.
 
> A VPS can certainly be "community owned", and so can a datacenter. The

You can rent height units or complete rack(s) as well, including contents.

> problem today is that there is little or no demand for "community
> owned" datacenters aimed just to provide VPSs for "personal server"
> usage, at least not enough to make them economically affordable.

It's mostly a marketing problem. There's plenty of VPN products for
end customers these days, due to the ISPs snooping on end users, and
being required by law to keep and release logs on demand.
 
> I am not sure if I answered your question, but I hope what I wrote
> will be helpful to ask more specific answers :-)
> 
> > Could a Cloud be Community Owned?
> 
> Yes, I think, but the real question is "why"? First you should define
> exactly what you mean by "cloud", next which communities really need a
> "cloud" and why, why is a "cloud" better than a "not-cloud"
> solution...

There's no need to use cloud, p2p is plenty enough. Just define
end user and community-operated nodes, and maybe intermediate infrastructure
as well.
 
> > What should a Community do with Profit?

Why, invest it into infrastructure operation, maintenance and upgrade.
Earthworks for one are remarkably expensive, especially a lot of them in
cluttered environment.
 
> this is a general question, which has nothing to do with clouds and
> which I'm not qualified to answer, I think. I suggest that you simply
> ignore it in the context of this thread. The point here is *if* you
> need a cloud in the first place, then *if* you really need it *if* you can build or buy
> your very own one.

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