[Freedombox-discuss] Email on the FreedomBox Discussion
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Hi all,
On 25/08/11 10:01, Aitor Pazos wrote:
> I see an availability issue running an e-mail server in FB,
> Normal users doesn't own what we can call a reliable environment. There are
> blackouts from time to time, the hair drier can shut down power, my ISP
> connection is not redundant, etc. For other services like instant messaging or
> VoIP if my environment fail I'm not able to access my network from my client
> devices (unless I'm on the road) and I will be unavailable to others anyway.
> But mail is different, mail is asynchronous, if the FB is not available when
> the message reach my home, it will be returned back to the sender and that's
> something we don't want to see.
> I think it's needed to provide some availability enhancement to FB users.
> Something like an equivalent to the MX priority DNS entries where if the FB
> fails, mails are forwarded to a backup server and resent to the FB as it
> becomes available. Obviously, users should be able to choose whether they want
> to use this backup server or not.
>
This availability issue has been raised a few times now, and it's not
limited to email (or to other asynchronous services). If the box hosts
social networking profiles and goes off line, all hosted profiles are
unavailable. The same goes for most services. Hosting a server at home
for the past 36 months taught me it can be quite frequent (for any
number of reasons: ISP problem, home router problem, power goes off,
someone unplugs the wrong wire, or walks on a cable and sets everything
waltzing, etc.). I also discovered it was the main objection friends
confronted me with when I offered to host their email inboxes or other
stuff like home pages (surprisingly, before --or at the same level as--
UI concerns (talking Roundcube vs Gmail for example)). So that's a big
blow to credibility and usability (it should also be clear by the fact
that availability is a big selling argument for cloud services like
Google Docs or ChromeOS, etc.).
I've been looking into how to overcome that for a few months now, and
with a friend (not on this list) we started documenting our ideas and
progress [0] (mailing-list here [1]). The idea of course is to rely on
friends' Freedomboxes, and that's possible in a variety of ways. The
hard parts for us now are to have a complete view of what technology and
projects are growing in that area (and finding out how we can blend them
together), and figuring out how we can plug in to Freedombox without
duplicating too many efforts. We're still in baby stages, and as usual
any kind of feedback is welcome :).
On the "how to do it" side (and why, after months, have we not made more
progress), there's a lot of ways one can organise this, and if we do it
properly it could also blend in with backing up to friends' boxes. Basic
ingredients are those of a CDN, but also Tahoe-LAFS, CouchApps, the
Unhosted.org model, pure P2P, and some interesting research in the area.
I'm still trying to figure out what exactly the various trade-offs are.
With those ingredients, the main questions I see are trust (in other
boxes/gateways providing services) and latency (for example if we have
gateways for distributed Tahoe storage, we double the latency to access
a social network profile). But there's also cooler stuff to dream about,
like including a Tahoe gateway in unhosted apps (therefore cutting down
on latency), or even homomorphic encryption, which could (maybe) avoid
having to trust other boxes than your own. Finally, it all depends on
the services targeted: email, XMPP, but also "do we allow server-side
scripting for web pages/apps, or do we go for client-side only?", etc.
As you might see, if we look further than the first idea of a private
CDN the possibilities are pretty vast (and clearly I'm having trouble
organising it). Since this looks like one of the pillar problems we'll
be facing we might as well come up with something smart to solve it.
Again, any feedback much appreciated :)
(Right now I'm learning about Tahoe and setting up a mini-grid to play
around with.)
Cheers..
[0] www.evomuse.org/wiki
[1] discussion started in French here:
http://lists.mehho.net/pipermail/mehho-users/2011-May/000010.html
then migrated to the current list, switching to English later on:
http://lists.mehho.net/listinfo/evomuse-project
- --
S?bastien Lerique
seblerique at wanadoo.fr | @wehlutyk on twitter/identi.ca
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