Checking out private clouds

[viking60]

Clouds are a way to steal private data and make them public so in terms of privacy caution is of the essence.

In general you should get the most sceptic with companies that spend a lot of time and money telling you how trustworthy they are.

Go for them who say: "Don't trust us" They are the honest ones

Another option is to make your own cloud and be in control of it. So to put my mouth where my eh.. mouth is:

Don't trust my clouds (make your own)!

I will not spend a marketing dime convincing you of my fantastic trustworthiness (which is excellent; by the way )

With this in mind I was searching for a cloud system that can keep your locally encrypted data that I - as an admin - cannot decrypt.
Owncloud has good encryption and is pretty safe but keeps the encryption key on the server. This makes it possible for the admin to decrypt and even if he is a nice guy; makes it possible to force him to decrypt.

Seafile encrypts on the client side and keeps the key there so this will not be possible there.

That makes Seafile the one to check out.
I installed it on Centos 7 and followed pretty much this howto It mostly is fine but the firewall part is wrong for Centos 7 where we have firewalld instead of Iptables so those iptable rules have to be added with firewall -cmd:

So I needed to check out my firewall zone

Code: Select all

firewall-cmd --get-active-zones

in my case it was "public" so i opened the ports like this:

Code: Select all

firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8000/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8082/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=10001/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=12001/tcp --permanent

Now it is time to reload the firewall

Code: Select all

firewall-cmd --reload

The rest was the same so I successfully installed the Seafile server with Mysql.

It is on port 8000 and is accessible from all computers in the network - If you provide a DNS from NO-IP it will be accessible from everywhere.

Here I can decide to share documents or folders and encrypt them. I can make groups to share with. Generate links that will point to the shared material etc.

Here is the list:

https://www.seafile.com/en/product/private_server/

All in all a clean and understandable interface.
There is also the option to install the seafile client to communicate with the server.

https://www.seafile.com/en/help/

This will sync with the seafile server and can be installed on Android iOS and Windows Smartphones. Naturally it can be installed on Apple Linux and Windows desktops too.
So this thing is truly interop capable

Universities in Germany and all over the world seam to prefer Seafile. You can also rent space in the cloud - on German servers - that shows that Seafiles focus is security:
Not that you should trust German clouds either; but they are better than say US clouds due to the regulations and laws that forbid data retention.

So this thing syncs well and is easy to use - at least I have a way of backing up my wife's smartphone now

And I have learned howto install a cloud server.

Want to try it?
Here is the Manual

[R_Head]

I think, with the world current events, we are going to see more and more Open Source OSs and services developments. Is a natural reaction of Government mistrust, not only with their people but each other Governments as well. If they want to be free they need to develop their own stuff. Just like we are doing.

I think, will be a nice business to have some like making home servers all pre-configured. From data, to email, Web page. The user gives access to whoever wishes and is on full control of their own data. It had to be done with an easy to use interface. I think, will be a hit.

[viking60]

I agree. Open source is a necessity because even the most trusted governments and car makers have proven that they cannot be trusted with closed software.

The temptations are too big.

These private server cloud things are not all that easy to handle yet but I believe they will get there. The clients are easy.

[viking60]

Some Seafile Features:

Operating system: Cross-platform (written in C and Python) - MS-Windows/Raspberry Pi/Linux private server
Desktop clients: Yes (Windows/Mac OS X/Linux)
Mobile clients: Yes (Android/iPad/iPhone)
Type: File cloud storage and data synchronization
Paid support: Yes via Professional Edition
Licence: GPLv3 (Community Edition)

It was easily installed on Centos but I have not yet managed to get it up and running on Manjaro or Arch (There are serious dependency errors in the AUR packages, so this is probably a program for the stable server distros. In fact it looks like seafile requires Selinux libselinux.so.1 which is the problem in Arch.)
Client software is available in your "App shop" (Where you download your Apps for your Android or iPhone etc)