ArkOS: Building the Anti-Cloud (on a Raspberry Pi)

angry tapir writes "arkOS is a Linux distribution that runs on the Raspberry Pi. It's an initiative of the CitizenWeb Project, which promotes decentralization and democratization of the Internet. arkOS is aiming to aid this effort by making it super-simple for people to host their own email, blogs, storage and other services from their own home, instead of relying on cloud services run by third parties. about the project."

Re:Good idea- difficult to implement

[fezzzz]

I recently bought a raspberry Pi with the idea of hosting a web server from home using a Huawei Dongle and the cell phone network. Due to the power wastage, I didn't think it a good idea to use my regular PC for the job.

First you obviously need to get the Huawei Dongle working with wvdial or something similar. This took me perhaps a week.

Then you need to contact your cell phone service provider and ask for an unrestricted APN otherwise they block all connections to your dongle. This took some paperwork, but I managed to get it done.

Once incoming connections are allowed, you can start hosting your website. The first proper request to my website activated the dongle's maximum power usage and this resulted in a power brown-out and the PI crashed. After upping the power supply from 700 mA to 1000 mA, this problem was solved.

NOIP and dyndns solved my dns problems easily.

The last problem I haven't solved yet is routing to my Pi with the cell phone networks. About 10% of the time, it finds a route, but the rest of the time it only finds the IP address. I will buy another sim card and see if it improves my situation, but in the mean time I've resorted to Amazon's cloud offering.

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Re:violation of net neutrality

[PopeRatzo]

If you want to run your own server, get an appropriate connection for that.

By "appropriate" do you mean, "one that Comcast deems appropriate" or one that is technically appropriate?

Believe it or not, there was a time, before ownership of the internet was turned over to the big telecoms, when you could host whatever kind of service you wanted on your internet connection. Back when there were these things called "ISPs" that you paid and they gave you bandwidth and that was pretty much the end of it.

Re: violation of net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Odd, I'll have to inform Concast of that. I pay $80 a month for business Internet, I do run my own servers, VPN in. To comcast. At my house.