Cloud Computing: Good or Bad for Open Source?

> It's NEVER about technology. It's ALWAYS about how you use it.

This deserves to be read over, and over, and over again.

Quoting:You can't really escape the trust factor unless you become your own host for everything which requires a good stable connection with the same speed both up and down, which is expensive.

Uh, what? The average cable and ADSL connection has between 1 and 4 Mbit up. That's more than enough to host yourself. I'm running four websites, IMAP and an iCal server from my home ADSL line with 1 Mbit up. It works fine.

Small business SDSL connections start at $50 or so for 2 Mbit up and down with 99.9% uptime guarantee. I can get cable here in my house that's 40 Mbit down, 4 Mbit up, 5 IP addresses, 2 VoIP line, 99.99% uptime and business-level support for $90 a month.

In a short while fiber will be available here. 100 Mbit up and down for $30 a month :-)

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, hosting yourself from home should be no problem at all. Just make sure you make regular off-site backups. I have a cron job that once a week simple tars everything together, GPG encrypts it and uploads in to the home server of a friend of mine. It's about 4 GB total. I keep a paper copy of my private GPG key in a safe on a remote location in case my house burns down so I can decrypt my backups.

Quoting:"Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!'

Sorry, coudn't resist.

I wish I'd thought of that.

@Sander

Unfortunately in Australia DSl is very expensive, for what you get. I'm paying $AU130 for about 750Kb up, and that is a business class connection. They don't like us hosting our own services.

Sander,

I guess it depends on where you live. 1Mbit up is still a luxury here in Croatia. With 5Mbit download I get only 512Kbit upload, for about $38 a month. Upload is waaay behind. And SDSL is simply prohibitive. I just did a quick check and the starting price for 1Mbit in both directions is $206 a month!

It's not even middle of nowhere. Croatia may be a small country, but I'm living in the biggest city, the capital, with nearly 1 million people and a regional metropolis.

Things may be improving slowly, albeit that could be affected by the global crisis, but as it stands right now unless you're lucky (which you apparently are), most people can't really afford it.

And we're not even mentioning the fact that most people aren't techies like us. Setting up your own server is probably greek to most people, but then again the same applies to renting a VPS.

I don't see a problem with running IMAP or iCal/CalDAV over 512 or 750 KBit/s either. It could be slow if you get hundreds of new mails in the same folder.

Alternatively, you could just SSH into your server and run Mutt or Pine from there. All that travels over the wire is the text UI. The only downside is that you won't be able to access your mails from your phone or something like that. Unless you have SSH on your phone (I have :-)

IMAP really isn't all that chatty. A friend of mine has unlimited internet access on his phone. It's really unlimited but only 128 Kbit/s. He uses it for IMAP with gMail and it seems to work.

Well just hosting email doesn't seem like enough of a justification to have a home server which ideally should be a separate always-on computer given that the desktop is busy with desktop activities and I sometimes dual boot, install new OS's (or new versions) etc...

If I'm gonna run a home server I'd like it to do everything, so I'm actually able to cancel my VPS subscription and save on that, but that requires a faster upload. If I can't do that and I have to maintain a VPS, then I might as well have an email service on it as well. Besides, email is hosted there only temporarily. I download it using a desktop client (thunderbird) and it is subsequently deleted from the server.

I have both a home and a remote server. My main website is on the remote server because my home line can't handle peak traffic (yet ;-). Sensitive and important stuff I keep on my home server, like e-mail, my own OpenID provider, source code repositories, bug tracker, calendaring, etcetera. I also use my home server as a jukebox. I've ripped my CD collection to ogg vorbis and use a home grow jukebox daemon (a bit like MPD but different) to stream music around my house.

Sounds like a nice set up. Maybe I do something like that some day when I get an extra comp or something.. For now this works for me.

I actually listen more to the music from internet stations than local stuff. :)

Doing something like that doesn't need to be expensive. A basic Dell PowerEdge server starts at $275 with a dual-core processor, 2 GB RAM and two hard drives. Alternatively you could check out local companies for hardware they don't use. My first server was a HP Netserver dual PII I got for free. My second server a dual Xeon ProLiant I bought for $200 off my boss. The only that you should look out for is power usage. That's why I replaced the power-hungry ProLiant with a Dell PowerEdge.

> A basic Dell PowerEdge server starts at $275 with a dual-core processor, 2 GB RAM and two hard drives.

The main thing you need on a home server is disk space and data backup. Which is readily accomplished by a pair of mirrored Terabyte SATA hard drives. Given that, pretty much any machine should be able to handle the job. Yeah, SCSi is better if you have a bunch of users, but it costs more and how many users does the average family have?

I use two 500 GB SATA drives in RAID 1 through mdadm in my server. It's about 75% full now. Mostly music, movies and backups. As I explained before in some other thread, all my home machines make a full rsync backup to the server when the shut down or reboot. Once a week, the server pushes a backup to the home server of a friend of mine. That backup doesn't contain music, movies, iso images and some other large content so it's about 4 GB tarred together. It does contain all essential data for all my home machines and the server itself.

Well, you all probably saw my home setup last time I posted it, so I won't post it again (unless someone asks). I do my primary email through my server at home (dovecot + postfix + spamassassin + horde, etc). I also do most of my web development on my home server. I really SHOULD setup a backup system to push the data from the personal machines over to the raided server and should get some sort of offsite backup setup for the important stuff...

@techiem You can find my backup scripts at my blog: http://www.jejik.com/articles/2006/07/easy_local_and_remote_...

If you can't get remote backup (or your upload is too slow) you could also get a separate external USB drive. Once a week, hook it to your server to make a backup. Just make sure you keep the drive in your fireproof safe/box together with your important papers (passports, etcetera), or in a place you can easily get to in case of fire (e.g. close to an escape route, next to your door) so you can grab it while you're running for safetly.

Quoting:e.g. close to an escape route, next to your door

That would make it easier for a burglar to grab, as well.

So, encrypt your backups like I do :-) Just make sure you have a copy of the key as well.

Done, and done.

Last week, I re-constituted my old backup system for my brother and his wife. Before I handed it over, I opened the old backup volume on it, using a password I hadn't needed for 10+ months. I was very pleased to remember it (after 8 false starts).

Love those password safes.

And also remember not to store the password to the backup in the backup [only].

jezuch: Sounds like leaving the car keys in the car while the car is closed, to make sure the car-keys cannot be stolen.

Is there some cheap location on the web where you can upload a 100Gb backup BTW? And is it possible to loopmount an AES-encrypted filesystem over FTP (or something like that)?

@hans: Take a look at Amazon S3 for storage. I don't think you can do volume encryption, but you can do file-by-file encryption like encfs.