[PROJECT] Leaving the public cloud with MBL

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Some time ago I have come to know the project Freedom Box , which envisions:

We live in a world where our use of the network is mediated by organizations that often do not have our best interests at heart. By building software that does not rely on a central service, we can regain control and privacy. By keeping our data in our homes, we gain useful legal protections over it. By giving back power to the users over their networks and machines, we are returning the Internet to its intended peer-to-peer architecture

I have bought the MBL to gain some more control on my personal data, be it documents, images, interests, searches, and so on… keeping it away from third-party, proprietary, profit-driven eyes is not easy in the way we have come to use internet.

For about two months now I have installed and removed plenty of mods to my MBL to help me reach this objective: simply be the owner and manager of my data, replacing third-party, proprietary web services with MBL-hosted services.

So, for instance, gmail or outlook.com, could be replaced by Roundcube (I believe it can be installed on MBL), or the different public cloud services have OwnCloud, or BitTorrent Sync as alternatives… Google Reader (R.I.P.) or Feedly can be replaced by TinyTiny RSS… and so on so forth.

This post is for those interested to share knowledge and experiences to achive a certain amount of independence by replacing third-party, proprietary web services with MBL-hosted services.

Of course, given its limited capabilities, the mods/web services, must have a small footprint on the resources of the little box. Secondly, they must be badwidth efficient: many - I believe - have only 1 Mb/s upload when they connect to their MBL from outside their LAN.

Anybody? Please share your thoughts and/or experiences…

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My general rule of thumb is basically stay away from anything that requires Java on the MBL and you will be fine. I have OwnCloud, h5ai, webfs, ZNC, PyLoad, Transmission, SABnzb and NZBGet all installed on a 1TB MBL and it doesn’t break a sweat. It sleeps like it should as well as long as you stay away from anything that requires Java.

I find that the combination of OwnCloud, h5ai and WD2GO is more than enough for my Cloud type needs. I haven’t ventured into the realm of email or RSS yet.

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I’ll start with my little experience…

I have plenty of space on my Skydrive account, but I decided to dump it… WD2GO did not enthusiast me… on the contrary, it kept freezing my PC… so i started using ownCloud. It is easy to install, and it is rather complete as cloud service. But it is very slow, even when accessing it on LAN… the sync desktop client if awful and consumes a LOT of resources on my PC… at present, I removed almost completely skydrive from my PC (mind you, I am working on a windows 8.1 preview), I syncronized MBL media shares (Pictures, Video, Music) to my correspondent libraries, leaving the files online (not offline) and I synchronized my private, documents MBL share to my Docments library on my PC with two-way [BitTorrent Sync](http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/17214-help-installing-bt-sync-on-wd-mybook-live/page hl mybook) (the files are available off-line and sync between the share and the documents library). The latter is SIMPLY AWESOME in performing its job!!!

The files on my MBL media shares continue to be available on my PC thanks to OpenVPN, which allows me to work as if I were at home, inside my LAN.

It would be nice to have also HTTP access of my online and off-line files, but after trying h5ai php directory index, and although attracted by other directory listing, I still have to understand how to go about the port to be used to access my shares via index.php (port 80 is busy with the MBL dashboard)… it would be nice to have something that allows you: 1. to access and stream media from webpage; 2. that allows to share media with others in a simple way.

I have tried to install also Tiny Tiny RSS, but without success…

To be complete, I would also love to install a webmail service, but I do not know if MBL can afford it, and if I can manage it… so far I resorted to using Lavabit.

As for the serch engine, I know there are some out there that can be integrated in a debian box, but for now I use duckduckgo.com

My two cents…

4

Thanks for the useful tip NFO!

so, NO Java please!

I hope someone could write a more complete guide to h5ai: I managed to get almost all of the lights green, except for the PDF thumbnail (and I had installed ImageMagick)…

How about this one? if one day I manage to get it working I write a guide…

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Did you install dirLIST? That looks rather nice :slight_smile: (EDIT, it looks like you haven’t)

I haven’t had as much time to mess with mods recently but with h5ai you should be able to symlink it to your DataVolume so you have access to all your files much like I did in the OwnCloud thread. Both servers running on port 80 isn’t an issue as you point h5ai to /public instead of /UI and the dashboard /UI is actually blocked from outside access.

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I will surely take a look at dirLIST when time permits. I have been waiting for Timmy to come back around so we can get the h5ai guide fixed up. I will PM him and see what we can work out.

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that’s good news from you…

I did take a look at dirLIST, but was not able to go beyond the credentials when accessing to http://mybookliveIP/Public where I placed the dirLIST…

I tried setting webDAV credentials with this method:

/usr/local/sbin/addUser_apache.sh <userId> <davuser> <passwrd>
- - appending to existing htpasswd file..

but it does not work for me… I guess I need to set up some different credentials…

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here is what I got so far, using h5ai guide (with relative changes)… each link I use sends me 404 error…

Screenshot.png
Screenshot.png1280×800 13.8 KB

any idea where from here?