Am 26.02.2011 um 23:00 schrieb Matthias-Christian Ott:
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 03:04:40PM -0600, Anthony Papillion wrote:
Asking everyone to run their own email server on the Freedom Box is
fine
- especially if it's pretty transparent and 'just works' for them.
But
the process of purchasing and associating a domain name with the box,
configuring the mail server to accept mail for the domain,
configuring
MX records, etc, are all over the average users head.
When I was pursuing my project, my solution was to run an
intermediate
domain service and then assign subdomains to each server sold.
Then, all
the user would have to do is go into the interface and plug in their
subdomain and the service would just work. We'd (me, initially) would
handle everything on the backend domain side.
Whereby you would create a single point of failure and essentially
don't
achieve your goal of decentralisation.
That, of course, would mean having an email address like
[email protected] but it would streamline management a
bit.
Obviously, this is not necessarily elegant or 'sexy'. How is the
Freedom
Box going to handle this? I know the boxes can communicate with each
other directly but that won't do for network->freedom box email or
for
freedom box->network mail.
There is no way around setting the MX record.
Another solution would be to create an overlay network and address
hosts by their public key fingerprint which I doubt will be easier for
the user.
Addressing seems to be an unsolved problem for average people anyhow.
Not everyone will have their own domain or subdomain. And even if they
do, it requires manual configuration regardless how good the user
interface is.
Another aspect is the centralised nature of the DNS. Though there
have been some ideas , I'm not aware of a working solution
and I doubt that there can be a global, consistent, self-organising
and anonymous DNS.
I am very enthusiastic from the idea of "zeroconf "(http://zeroconf.org
) and "wide area bonjour" ( http://dns-sd.org/ )
and this projects takes the best pieces of everything to build a
distributed name system.
--------
UIA is a distributed name system and ad-hoc routing infrastructure
which provides zero-configuration connectivity among users' mobile
devices without the use of centralized servers. Each user has a local
namespace which is shared among all her devices and is always
available on every device. Users can assign personal names to each of
their devices, and can also name other users and access their friends'
namespaces. UIA devices automatically maintain connectivity with other
named devices, both in ad-hoc networks and in the global Internet when
available.
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/uia/
------------
comments welcome
greetings
Marc
--
Les enfants teribbles - research / deployment
Marc Manthey- Vogelsangerstrasse 97
50823 Köln - Germany
Tel.:0049-221-29891489
Mobil:0049-1577-3329231
blog: http://let.de
project : http://opencu.org
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Opinions expressed may not even be mine by the time you read them, and
certainly don't reflect those of any other entity (legal or otherwise).
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