[Freedombox-discuss] What do you use your FBX for?

[jays@panix.com (Jay Sulzberger)]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2012, Rob van der Hoeven <robvanderhoeven at ziggo.nl> wrote:

>> Im just wondering if people are actually running freedomboxes for
>> useful things right now?
>
> I have been running a FreedomBox (a QNAP TS-119 NAS running Debian
> Squeeze) for 1.5 years now. These are the things i use it for:
>
> 1) NAS.
> 2) 3 * WordPress blog (freedomboxblog.nl, my brothers website and an
> experimental website)
> 3) Owncloud for sharing stuff with family and friends.
>
> I also use it to explore the GNUniverse, testing lots of services like
> webservers, frameworks, VPN etc.
>
> Rob.
> http://freedomboxblog.nl

Your site http://freedomboxblog.nl is available to me by the
usual method of telling Firefox to go there and show me the first
page.

Many people in New York City have a Net connection supplied by
Time-Warner Cable.  The cable modem, and Time-Warner Cable's part
of the Net, allows most incoming connections, but not all.
Usually behind the cable modem, in the house of the Time-Warner
Cable customer, there is a "home router".  By default this router
allows no incoming connections.  How do you make available
http://freedomboxblog.nl?

My object in asking this is:

I think that running a freedombox, in the way most partisans of
the project envision, requires that the owner of the freedombox,
which is a computer plus software, be able to allow arbitrary
incoming Net connections.  If the freedombox is in my house, it
will, likely, be behind both the Time-Warner Cable cable modem,
and a home router.  How will a direct Net connection be made?
Note that PageKite, which is a serious effort, requires third
party help, at the level of an application running over the Net,
to make the connection into my freedombox.  That is, using
PageKite, if I wish to allow an incoming connection from you to
me, the stream must go though a box not owned by you, and not
owned by me.  My object is to find out what third party and
non-third party methods of making Net connections work today.

oo--JS.