New Milestone for EnThinnai: Running on a home server
Apr 28th, 2011 by Aswath
Yesterday I posted about a new class of devices that I would call “micro servers”. These are inexpensive Ubuntu boxes that consume very little electricity that can be used to run different always on applications. Such a device is a perfect fir for EnThinnai. This post is a record of that experiment.
EnThinnai is a web application built around Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and Java. Ubuntu Software Center has MySQL and OpenJDK in its repository. So it was a simple matter to install them. A friend of mine gave me instructions to install Apache and Tomcat via command line interface. Finally installing EnThinnai is copying the relevant war file to the appropriate location. That is it. EnThinnai is up and continuously running now for a few days. The current version of EnThinnai is designed to be run on a server on the public Internet. But I am running Efika behind a NAT that gets dynamic IP address. So I have registered a dynamic Domain name and have to setup some port forwarding rules in my NAT. With these configurations, people can access Efika and access information that I am sharing with them. So far so good.
The development team is looking into ways to handle dynamic IP address and NAT issues as well. Once these are done, an average user will be able to setup an EnThinnai server and ready to share information with their friends and family.
Significance of EnThinna running on a home server
There have been many proposals on having a federated system of social networks and sharing information between them. Last year Diaspora* got lots of public attention and beginning of this year an Alpha version was made available. Even though the main thrust of Diaspora* is federated social networking, running on servers at home is not a major focus. Recently another effort, FreedomBox Foundation declared its focus is personal ownership of data and privacy protection and declared its intention to run their application on plug computers running at users’ homes.
EnThinnai running on Efika meets the service objectives of both these efforts. Indeed it does more in one major aspect: there is no requirement on you for me to share my information with you. Most social networks and Diaspora* require you to have credentials issued by them to access the information I want to share with you. Additionally they require some form of bilateral relationship between you and me. Contrary to this, EnThinnai uses OpenID to authenticate you and there is no requirement that you share any information with me. In fact you may not be running EnThinnai at all. Some have equated this asymmetric relationship to Twitter’s. But I feel they are different. In Twiiter, you and I share information with the whole world and you opt to be notified of my sharing independent of the fact whether or not of my option. Enthinnai allows me to share information with you (may even be just you), even though you may not share any information with me.
VoIP with no service provider
One of the features of Enthinnai is to allow my visitors to initiate text and voice chat session with me. To do this they contact my EnThinnai server via a browser to dynamically download a plugin and we two can have an IM session or a VoIP (wideband audio for those who are paying attention to such things) call. In this respect I am my own VoIP provider. If you want to try it out, please let me know. I will make myself available and we can have a chat session.
Uphill battle
In many ways solving the technical difficulties and designing the service architecture has been easy. But I have consistently encountered rejection of the idea of running servers at home. The whole industry has tacitly assumed that having centralized server farms by a big central entity is the optimal thing. Only the other day, I read that Google killed GDrive project because the files are already in the cloud. For all the criticism of poor privacy handling of central entities like Facebook, very few people consider this alternative is feasible. This from the industry that prides itself for designing a system conforming to the maxim “Intelligence at the end”.
Many have cautioned that people don’t want to deal with the complexity of running a server on their own. My counter point is that the same users own and operate more complicated machinery like automobile and other home appliances. So I hold out the hope that if we could design the system and software that hides the complexity then people will prefer to own and operate their own data sharing systems.
Aswath,
Congrats!
This is definitely a milestone for EnThinnai.
There could also be potential intra-home Applications for these Micro-servers.
Prakash