

ArkOS for the Raspberry Pi - waldohatesyou
https://arkos.io/

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StavrosK
Please add a torrent for the release. It's very convenient (for me, at least),
because I am currently on my phone and opening torrent links automatically
tells my home server to download them.

Plus, you know, it saves you a bunch of bandwidth. But mainly do it for me.

~~~
jcook818
Sure! I'll look into it and have something ready soon. Thanks for the
suggestion.

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aroman
If a major goal of this project is to allow me to host my own reliable,
modern, usable, email server with dead-simple auto-configuration for $25, I am
_extremely_ excited.

I'm curious, what will your email stack look like?

~~~
jcook818
The backend will likely use Postfix as MTA and dovecot (or other more
lightweight solution) as MUA. Haven't settled on a final configuration yet.
The magic will happen with the frontend and the utilities that oversee its
operation, of course, and those will be custom developed.

I'm also working on a system for optional caching (encrypted, of course) which
would help if your arkOS node is knocked offline, as to not screw up mail
processing locally or for your communication partners. But that is still in
rough planning.

~~~
shiftpgdn
Sorry if I missed this somewhere but how does arkOS intend to handle delivery
issues? Many consumer ISPs make it very difficult for an end user to have good
mail delivery rates, and especially so to freemail providers like Google,
Hotmail(MSN), Yahoo, etc.

~~~
jcook818
Without getting into it too much (i could write a novel :p ), the caching
system will have a role to play in this. There are many different ways to
solve this problem, and rest assured that creating a competent and stable mail
system (and all that entails) is top priority.

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donniezazen
From what I hear, you might be violating your internet provider's terms and
conditions by hosting websites and email server on your personal connection.
And other email providers might also reject emails sent from personal servers.
Anyone here has more information on these issues.

That being said. It looks like an amazing product. As a long time Arch Linux
user this is very pleasing.

~~~
bigiain
My current project involves a RasPi, iRedMail, a handful of inexpensive VPS
providers with APIs that allow automated provisioning (DigitalOcean, NineFold,
and Hetzner – to spread out the jurisdictions) – with the RasPi opening a
reverse SSH tunnel for ports 25 and 465. Add in a DNS provider with a useable
API so the 'Pi can spin up and shut down VPSes itself and update MX records to
suit, and VPS images configured to not log anything mail-related (I'm learning
Chef and/or Ansible to automate this), and I think I've gone as far as I can
to secure my end of all my email.

(Possible over-paranoid ideas include refusing port 25 smtp connections that
wont negotiate a secured connection in response to a STARTLLS command, and
possibly blacklisting mail originating from any of the 8 known PRISIM
participants. I like the _idea_ of ensuring none of my mail arrives from
known-intercepted sources, but reality dictates otherwise since way too many
of the people I really do want to communicate with are exclusively using
gmail/yahoo for email - or worse still, have migrated largely to Facebook
messaging instead of email)

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synchronise
Are there plans to include Email as a service in the future?

Also, will it be ported to other, more powerful hardware?

~~~
jcook818
Yes and yes! Email is in the works and should be ready within 1-2 months.
First goal is to get it working well and out of beta on the RPi, then after
that it will be ported to other architectures.

~~~
StavrosK
Please please please offer a secure (i.e. up to date and also TLS-preferring),
pre-set-up email server with ArkOS, complete with instructions on how to
create MX, SPF and DKIM records for one's domain. You will do everyone who's
interested in privacy a great service and deal a blow to the mass surveillance
agencies.

~~~
jcook818
This is exactly the plan :)

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deadfish
Exciting project. Needs to have some more apps before it can be adopted by the
masses. We need a platform that is as simple as an iPhone but designed simply
to be 'the personal cloud platform'. It should offer the security the freedom
box promises and still offer solutions to less serious problems like torrent
downloading and music streaming.

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Nican
ArkOS seems to have a really nifty dashboard for managing all the services,
but I do not seem to gather any evidence that it works anywhere else. Are
there any alternatives for the dashboard on other linux flavors?

~~~
dvanduzer
The dashboard is the least interesting part of ArkOS. Using extremely
inexpensive hardware for a decentralized cloud is the Big Idea.

I don't see much on how these things are supposed to integrate with each
other, though. If they aren't trying to solve that problem...

Anyway, Webmin has been around for eons if you need that.

~~~
jcook818
Without an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard, targeted for actual users and
not just sysadmins, making the "decentralized cloud" a reality isn't really
possible :) The first problem to solve is making reliably self-hosting one's
own data no longer rocket science. After that, interaction with other devices
(meshnets, etc) may be a focus.

~~~
dvanduzer
Reliable self-hosting of data is not a technical problem or a UI problem. It's
a political problem. True Cryptography for the masses is Too Dangerous.

But just talking about the UI question, "intuitive, user-friendly dashboard"
is absolutely not the issue when it comes to systems administration. I can
tell ArkOS/Genesis is already way too far off course because there is a
separate GUI interface to /etc/fstab.

~~~
jcook818
I wouldn't say that it's _not_ a technical or UI problem. But I do agree that
there are also political problems. Decentralizing "the cloud" isn't just
something that can be addressed by technical means. But technology plays a big
part in changing the status quo.

The dashboard was forked from a prior project called Ajenti, which the fstab
interface and many other parts were included from. It is being converted in
stages and that is one that has not been addressed yet. So be patient, the
current version is far from what a usable edition is supposed to look like. :)

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kbaker
Hi, just curious, any reason this is using Arch as a base instead of a Debian
base? I understand if you want to target specifically the RPi first but I
think that using Debian will make it easier to port to other arches in the
future (specifically armhf for the BBB and other more modern CPUs.)

I saw this as well [https://bbs.arkos.io/t/why-arch-linux-why-not-
raspian/43](https://bbs.arkos.io/t/why-arch-linux-why-not-raspian/43) but
still think you should consider moving over... :P

Anyways, very cool project!

~~~
jcook818
A few reasons, including ease of maintaining package repos with pacman,
rolling-release nature, easy networking tools, and more. I will also concede a
bit of personal preference :) But like that post said, there isn't much of a
reason in my mind to consider the specifics of individual distros, as arkOS is
very "bare bones" and should require ideally no command line use in the first
place. I haven't had any difficulty in getting Arch/ALARM to play nice with
other architectures in the past but if you have specific experiences I'd love
to hear about them. Thank you!

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Nerten
Genesis looks like old version of Ajenti.

~~~
jcook818
It was forked from the old version of Ajenti. The documentation on the site
(arkos.io) is out of date, there have been a lot of changes and visual
improvements since.

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dsschnau
How can I use this as a home web server if my ISP blocks port 80?

"Don’t want the trouble of buying your own domain? Don’t worry. arkOS will
allow you to connect your node to the Internet anyway, through a variety of
services like dynamic DNS and port relays. Sometimes your Internet connection
might prohibit you hosting your own data. In these circumstances, arkOS will
provide ways to connect your node to the greater World Wide Web."

How does that work?

~~~
jcook818
We are developing a dynamic DNS service as well as port proxying that allows
you to serve traffic on non standard ports as if they were normal.
[https://github.com/cznweb/deluge](https://github.com/cznweb/deluge)
(Disclaimer: We can't encourage you to violate the ToS of your ISP, so if port
blocking is against the rules then that is for individuals to handle
themselves.)

In the future (read: when the dashboard and the aforementioned tools are
stable) there may be ways for individual arkOS nodes to communicate with each
other without an intermediary, mesh-style. But that is a long way off.

~~~
dsschnau
Wow.. cool! I'm excited about this project. Are you looking for help with FOSS
things (documentation, bug reports, etc.)?

~~~
jcook818
Definitely need help with testing and development. Documentation as well but
it takes time to understand the complexities of the working parts. Hit me up
on Twitter if you want a full list of things, always looking for help at every
skill level :)

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nwh
Seems to boot fine in qemu if anybody would like to have a quick play with it,
though it's fairly useless until I figure out how the network adaptor works.

~~~
jcook818
awesome! You can run Genesis (the dashboard, which does most of the work) in
any Arch-based VM as well, that's probably your best bet if you want to be
able to look around quickly.
[https://github.com/cznweb/genesis](https://github.com/cznweb/genesis)

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kazagistar
One of the key features of the windows environment I have found myself envious
of recently is single sign-on and rule/group/permission based user and device
management. While a reasonable equivalent can be constructed with Samba,
Kerberos, SSH, Puppet, etc, a unified system would be absolutely fantastic.
What is the chance of support for tools like these in the web interface?

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blutack
ClearOS is a good choice if you're looking for something like that - all users
are stored in a central LDAP database which everything else authenticates
against, and it has a nice webui.

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sspiff
Is this available for other platforms as well? I see no reason why this
couldn't be available as a package for Ubuntu as well, but I can't find any
mention of things other than RPi images.

I run a low-power x86 Ubuntu server at home and would love to try this (I was
actually planning to move my e-mail from Google to my own server).

~~~
jcook818
It's not available quite yet, but Genesis will eventually be ported to other
platforms/architectures. I just wanted to start with a focus of 'one' for
simplicity's sake. Genesis (the dashboard) itself is Python so you don't need
to worry much about architecture. It's just distro compatibility that needs
work. So stay tuned :)

~~~
sspiff
I completely understand the desire to start with one uniform and ubiquitous
platform, and eagerly await a cross-distro release :)

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edwardhotchkiss
I have web, mail (so-so, testing only) and a super early concept of a
distributed service monitor for rpi users (pi-up) in use a bit now. I'll reach
out, would love to see more and so nice to see something like this out there!

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cdcarter
Has anybody tried flashing this to a BeagleBone Black with any success?

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jcook818
Not yet, but I plan on adding support for the BBB in the future.

