Keeping faith to my previous words on cloud computing, I’ve decided to work on my own installation of ownCloud.
ownCloud is a service developed by the KDE team which aims to realize a personal storing and sharing platform for files and information.
In simple terms, and using words now commonly spread in the world of web 2.0, it is a personal Dropbox system managed and installed on our own systems, using our own ip addresses and our own disk space.
It’s actually a webDAV service with some bells and whistles, including a small PHP management and configuration portal. WebDAV is not new, it’s been out for years, but recentlly it’s gathering popularity due to its usage in all modern shared disk space services.
Requirements are really minimal: you need a Linux distribution with Apache, PHP, mySQL or SQLite for backend, and some disk space. I’ve assigned to it the same virtual machine I’m using for monitoring, and I’ve added a virtual disk within vSphere’s datastore.
Actually it’s still missing something to be a full Dropbox replacement: a local sync client, allowing to keep a local folder in continuous synchronization with the service, and allowing to copy the content on several installations. A client is on the works but it’s still not ready.
Currently it’s possible to use ownCloud through webDAV on all devices supporting it, and it can be “mounted” on KDE’s Dolphin, adding a new network folder.
For the adventurous LoneStar Network users who are willing to test it, you can to have an account. As soon as there will be userfriendly clients ready for use on Linux/Mac/Windows I will publish proper instructions, and the service will become part of LoneStar Network’s offering for its users.
