Re: A Small Organisation Server as a Debian Pure Blend
On Tue, 2020-11-17 at 22:10 +0530, Joseph Nuthalapati wrote:
> FreedomBox has been successfully used in community deployments to
> serve
> a number of useful applications from a locally hosted server. This is
> documented in the WikiBook, FreedomBox for Communities[1].
>
> I agree with you that a Debian Pure Blend for small organizations
> overlaps significantly with FreedomBox. However, there are some
> differences to keep in mind:
>
> 1. FreedomBox's primary focus is on privacy, not self-hosting in
> general.
> 2. FreedomBox is meant to be small and personal, so supporting an
> organization with a thousand users is not a priority for the project.
>
An organisation with a thousand users, or more should expect to be
putting more resources into administration than one of 20 to 200, which
is what I would call a small organisation. I presume, for example that
the members know each other already, as they have something which
brings them together.
An important part of privacy is to separate what you intend to make
public from what you wish to keep private. If all content creation
happens on platforms where the content consumers need (free, but
exchanged for their privacy) registration to access that content then
accessing them through Tor does not provide any benefit.
> The applications desired by home users and office users can be
> different. For example, a home user can be satisfied with a simple
> expense tracker to manage personal finances, while an organization
> might
> require full-blown accounting software.
>
I would not normally expect the small organisation to do their accounts
on a hosted web service, even self hosted, as that is the type of thing
which I would regard as private (at least up to the stage where they
publish their accounts). I would prefer that their treasurer did they
type of simple home office work via LibreOffice Calc and so on, but
realistically they probably use Excel - but that is a different topic.
> That being said, FreedomBox is currently the only pure blend that is
> primarily meant for hosting servers. Hence it can be a very good
> foundation on which to start the pure blend for small organizations.
>
I am experimenting with a fork of Freedombox which does takes some of
the things which are only relevant for a system behind NAT on a home
network, and which I hope than then back pulled back into the main code
base.
> FreedomBox is already being published as an Amazon Machine Image for
> easy self-hosting on AWS EC2[2]. Currently, this is only being
> recommended for trial purposes to FreedomBox users.
>
> As Wookey mentioned, in case of a cloud setup, some modules that
> assume
> that the device is on a home network can be turned off or some
> features
> selectively disabled.
>
> Regardless of whether applications are integrated into FreedomBox
> itself
> or a new pure blend is made, the primary challenge is still packaging
> large web applications for Debian. In my opinion, it is better to not
> invest effort into building another web application like FreedomBox.
> Instead, reuse the parts which FreedomBox got right and put more
> efforts
> into bringing more server applications into Debian.
>
> 1. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FreedomBox_for_Communities
> 2. https://freedombox.org/cloud/
>
One of the first things I want for my ambrige-gaden-club.org.uk example
is email, as in an MTA (postfix), with IMAP server (Dovecot) and web
access (roundcube) - but with the expectation that in general most
members will have an existing mail address, so it will just be
forwarding. This is a very common use-case for small organisations at
present, but hard to get right. (one of the reasons for using an
example organisation rather then one of the ones I am involved in is
that I can experiment without losing real people's email etc.
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