Given the way things have been going in the US, the work I put into #Dropserver feels more important today than it was two days ago.
Americans must have agency over their interactions on the internet. https://dropserver.org is unfinished, imperfect and limited in scope, but it's my part in resisting.
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@teleclimber Thank you for your work on this! I'm currently building something very similar called Home Cloud (https://home-cloud.io). I love that there are others trying to tackle this issue! We need these types of platforms so that people are empowered to take back control of their digital lives. The more people we have working on solutions the better we all are. Keep up the good work!
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@jgkawell Sorry just getting around to looking more at this. Selling hardware is an interesting approach that I would love to see more of. It's not for the faint of heart though! I'd love to know more about how you're approaching this.
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@teleclimber Yeah hardware is... well hard. There's everything from procurement to support and honestly so far it seems like support is the worst part of it. We're new the hardware sales business so we're figuring it out as we go along.
Our goal is to sell products that the customers truly own. They own the hardware, they own the software, and they can do with it completely as they wish. Ultimately that will mean we'll need to be sourcing our own hardware so that it's all open-source for...
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@teleclimber ... modders and hackers to work on. Our first iteration is focusing on the (pretty large) mini-pc platform. So the boxes are Intel N100 chips with 16GB of RAM, an NVMe boot drive, and a big SATA SSD for storage.
We're also focusing on everything being configuration. That means the operating system is NixOS and the application orchestration is Kubernetes (using k3s so it's lightweight). The user simply manages things through a locally hosted web UI and doesn't have to bother with...
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@teleclimber ... any of the underlying details.
The tough part is the abstraction. Making a self-hosting platform that someone who can only manage an iPhone can pickup and use. We're spending a lot of time making the interface and management simple, but we also have toggles for things like SSH for the power users.
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@jgkawell Yes that's a lot of challenges already. But what are you doing for the networking side? Is it expected that the owner gets a domain name and a fixed IP, or that they use some dynamic DNS thing? Or are you thinking of something else?
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@teleclimber We're building something else. If you've ever used Tailscale or Netbird it's very similar to that. Basically if you have a simple server hosted offsite, you can use NAT traversal to get two machines (think your home server and your phone) to connect directly to each other. You wrap the whole thing in Wireguard encryption so it's all end-to-end encrypted and you get fully private and secure access to anything on your home server!
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@teleclimber Here's a rough sketch of how it works (let me know if you'd like alt text!).
I'll have a more formal write up of the entire protocol in a blog post some time soon but I'm happy to get into any details you're curious about.
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@teleclimber Forgot to mention that the "simple server" or "Locator" as we're calling it will be something we host and provide as a service, but it is also fully open-source for anyone who wants to run their own.
Here's the protocol. It's a simple wrapper around STUN with some additional bits to provide a secure Wireguard encryption layer.
https://github.com/home-cloud-io/core/blob/main/api/platform/locator/v1/locator.proto
And here's the service itself. It's a very simple Go binary.
https://github.com/home-cloud-io/core/tree/main/services/platform/locator
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@jgkawell Yeah I've come to the same conclusion: better to hide from the public internet and use private networking. It's far safer and potentially easier. I decided to integrate Tailscale into Dropserver as a starting point.
If I understand correctly you'll need client-side software to make this work, right? So Android app, iphone app, etc... Also you'll need to integrate into DNS and offer domain names and TLS certs to get a secure context in the browser. It adds up!
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@jgkawell Having said that I think the approach you are pursuing is a good one. Bypass installation and Linux problems by selling hardware, and bypass networking issues with software defined networking.
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@teleclimber It's encouraging to hear you're headed in the same direction networking wise! Yeah building smaller private networks seems far more doable than trying to wrangle the public web.
We will need client apps, because we're emulating the same type of system as things like Netbird we're planning to pull a lot of their client code to build our apps with (Netbird is fully open source and their client SDK is written in Go).
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