“It allows you to easily host your own website, email, ‘cloud’ and more, all within arm’s reach. It does this by interfacing with existing software and allowing the user to easily update and change settings with a graphical interface. No more need to depend on external cloud services, which can be insecure ‘walled gardens’ that require you to give up control over your data. arkOS will have several different components that come together to make a seamless self-hosting experience possible on your Raspberry Pi. Each of these components will work with each other out-of-the-box, allowing you to host your websites, email, social networking accounts, cloud services, and many other things from your arkOS node.” I have to look into this.
Let’s hope this one will be using open protocols though (webdav, ftp, sftp) alongside some of the more closed ones unlike most of these devices so far.
According to the site, it’s fully open-source and it appears to offer a RasPi version of the sort of “streamlined setup and management for your own Linux cloud host” functionality available via stuff like ownCloud (and one whose name I forget where the primary language of development is French).
I doubt proprietary protocols will be an issue.
Edited 2013-06-07 21:28 UTC
Does this have a webmail component? How is the performance? How many mailboxes can go on a Pi?
Hey there — I’m the dev on the project. It will have a mail and webmail plugin in the near future, that is still in development. Concerning ‘how many mailboxes’, that depends on how much space each mailbox needs (per the size of your SD card) and how much traffic each one gets. Performance is fine for personal hosting and applications, which is what arkOS targets; I am going to extend support to other platforms like the Beagleboard Black to allow for people who need an extra bit of power.
EXCELLENT. The website seems to be down. Did you get murdered by the NSA for not being gmail?
What I want to see here is clustering, so that it would be possible to set up a cluster of these things with your friends and ensure some degree of availability.
Edited 2013-06-08 14:26 UTC
Clustering is on the list of features that I hope to implement in the future. There is also a special server in the works to handle dynamic DNS and port forwarding integration for people with picky ISPs.
Thanks, always good to head from the devs
This really looks interesting, I will try it out.
To have a server where the best you can hope for in terms of mass storage is USB.
Here’s hoping it will also run on the CubieBoard – at least it has AN SATA port. (ooh, all one of them)
I REALLY wanted to like the Pi… but it’s just too crippled with an anemic set of inputs and outputs even by Arduino Nano standards… It’s part of why mine’s gathering dust while I’m working with Teensy++ and Teensy 3.0 for everything low-level and Cubie’s/Beagles for the big stuff.
I like this idea, just as I like the idea of freedombox and diaspora. The problem things like this and freedombox may encounter though is that many residential broadband contracts (that I have come across) explicitly prohibit the hosting of services across the provided connection.
So while those of us who chose our ISP because we wanted to host services will be okay, the average punter may fall foul of their ISPs Terms and conditions. I appreciate they may not be target audience here but it is a factor which may affect take-up outside of a niche demographic. The difference here to be fair seems to be that it is not looking to replace Facebook et al but to replace GMail and Google Drive et al. That gives it a greater possibility of success if you ask me but the ISP Terms issue may still cause problems.