[p2p-research] personal server technology

[Matt Boggs]

Message: 11

Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:58:53 +0100

From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>

Subject: Re: [p2p-research] personal server technology

To: p2presearch at listcultures.org

Message-ID: <20100221195853.GM17686 at leitl.org>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

 

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.

 

Yeah, me too, I was only on my first cup of coffee and was too lazy to think
of anything else.

 

 

> 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.

 

I had two racks. It was a big loft, I'm pretty deaf anyway and during the
summer the swamp cooler was even louder.

 

> 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.

 

Most people don't have any sort of localized failover mechanisms let alone
UPS.. 

 

> 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).

 

You answered your own question.

 

> 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.

 

These are either too expensive\constrictive\too slow\ or unsecure at this
time.

 

> 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).

 

True, but even local ISPs keep the upstream bandwidth slow unless you pay up
for higher tier service with a block of IPs.

 

> 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. 

 

All I've seen was eDonky as any type of index back in the day and it was
awful, but, that would be great if it really is happening now for
individuals .

 

> 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.

 

Rolling your own would involve unrolling your own wire house to house as
well if things get nasty J

> Final thought: a peer based internet using an ISP backbone is

 

certainlyYou 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.

 

Time.

 

> 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. 

 

Their software layer is subscriber to subscriber.

 

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

 

Check out Tahoe.

yep

 

> 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.

 

Very true, I guess we'll have to wait for the Hundredth Monkey threshold to
kick in.

 

Lastly, regarding Community owned ISPs:

These were all over the place less than 15 years ago in the US. Then they
were bought out or regulation had their pipes taken away.

VPS can most certainly be community owned. Better yet, purchase a dedicated
server that you own in a data center that does all the maintenance. 

 

Matt

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100221/5a65400c/attachment.html>