I’ve found the rS-community through the unhosted.org site and if I understand it correctly this is the place to ask about unhosted stuff in general too.
I’m very excited about the whole unhosted/rS thingy and I want to dive into it.
As I’m in the the works of helping to mount a local server collective for others tired of the AYDABTU-crew[1] I thought I’d want to get started by figuring out how to set up a small server on a Raspberry PI to act as my rS and get started with my own unhostedness.
The apps I’m looking to deal with are:
email (incl. PGP, filtering and lists)
a personal wiki (something like [zim][2] but for the browser)
some kind of publishing of my findings (possibly by making some wiki-pages public)
I don’t really do much more online
Anyway, what I’m trying to get help with are some more specific things:
Setting up an unhosted server on local hardware for testing - and to later deploy it on a Raspberry. (put in another way: it would be nice if the server-adventure on [unhosted.org] [3] included info for people that want to set up their own server at home and not just buy VPS+TLS)
Hm, and now I saw the “Get STorage” part not sure why I didn’t see that before, will dwell! Understanding how to make my own rS-server, is there a reference implementation of the latest spec, etc? (put in another way: please update [http://remotestorage.io/provide/] [4] including links to current examples.)
If I get a little help those two things I’m sure I can slowly get to them and then onwards
/eadna
ps. I’m not really a proficient coder, but I have patience and time to get my head around stuff - moslty I think I could figure these things out myself, but I’m guessing that since I would like to know this someone else will too and I think it might lower the threshold for not-yet-believers
if you want to run your remoteStorage server at home, and even if you yourself only access it from home, as soon as you publish things, you need to add a TLS certificate to it, and you will also need to get a static IP address at home, use Pagekite, or use a dynamic DNS service. otherwise people will not be able to access your server from outside your home network.
but you can do that later. for now, you can just put reStore on your server at home. I’m not sure whether a raspberry pi is powerful enough to host the data for multiple people, maybe it’s better to take an old desktop PC or laptop for this purpose?
i have to warn you that if you are not a coder, then you will probably have a hard time using remoteStorage. it’s still under development, and other than the examples on https://unhosted.org/apps/ there are not many apps yet. There is Litewrite for writing text documents, Sharesome for publishing photos and other files, and Dogtalk for jabber.
the reference implementation is reStore. it’s running the 01 spec, but that is what you will need for most live applications out there (and the difference with the 02 spec is not very big).
Thanks for the help, I will check out #remotestorage later when I have more specific questions and time to actually have a real time conversation.
Anyway, I have d/l the starter kit and got it running, one observation and one problem:
a) the install instructions assume knowledge of how node.js works (and probably that is reasonable, but not in my case), slightly changing the readme would have made perfectly clear to me how to get it working without having to make educated guesses. Something like (for para#3):
“First download the package and in the resulting directory install all dependencies: npm install”
b) after launching the server, etc I open http://localhost/ in FF (Using Ubu12.04) I get the splash-screen and can go to the ‘Hello World’ app. Unfortunately it can’t sync with the credentials said to work (me@localhost). A little digging around gave that the port listed in the readme and the port actually used in the starter-kit.js are different. Changing the port on line 9 to 8001 fixed it (eg. config.storagePort = 8001)- I will get a github account and file a bug report.
/eadna
concerning RasPi
I don’t intend to run rS for several ppl on a RasPi, just toying with the RasPi for practice and testing I will check out that combo later when I’m pleased with how I get it working on my desktop comp.
sorry, i was just updating it this afternoon so that it now runs on port 8001. that means that on linux and mac you no longer have to run it as root, which is safer.
thanks for the tip about explaining more what node and npm do, i updated the text.
If you want to dig into the future of wikis, then I recommend the Federated Wiki by Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham. It is also a Node application and uses a slightly different approach to information organization than common wikis because it shares different opinions through federation, easily composes content by refactoring and breaks with the Neutral-Point-of-View-paradigm.
I can also recommend ClouDNS from Bulgaria. They have free plans for DNS for any domain you can set the nameservers yourself and provide a nice HTTP-API to update hosts, i.e. via a crontab.
