2010/5/26 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson <[email protected]> > Hello GNU-Social :-) > > I've been watching with keen interest the activity in the free/open-social > space over the past few weeks, finally got around to subscribing to your > list. I've got an idea kicking around in my head (and a basic design), > which might or might not be useful. Considering that I have considerably > more ideas than I have time, I figured I'd try to start a discussion before > spending much more time on it. > > Would it be useful for the various open-social projects if there were a > cloud-based dynamic HTTP-front-end service? > > This would be similar to DynDns, except instead of pointing your DNS > records at your current IP, which may be firewalled, it would create a > tunnel from your machine to an in-the-cloud reverse HTTP proxy, so a locally > running HTTPD on your machine can serve requests to the general internet. > Combined with a dynamic DNS solution, this would allow you to run your > social web-app (or whatever else) on your own hardware, no matter how many > firewalls are in your way and no matter how much you move around. > > Behavior when you aren't online is a fun topic: it could be anything from a > dropped request, to a 'Sorry, I'm not online now' page, to automatic > failover to a mirror on a friend's machine. > > Doing this for clear-text HTTP is very possible, for HTTPS this is pretty > hard to do without running out of IP-addresses. So an 'open social' web > using a system like this would sacrifice over-the-wire encryption and > authentication, but instead gain total local control over your software > stack (aside from the proxies, of course). >
Welcome! Yes, that sounds like it would be very useful. Why would you run out of IP addresses? I currently use dyndns.org(proprietrly sadly) to redirect to my apache https, but something using free software would be awesome. > > I don't know if that is an appealing trade-off for anyone... but man I wish > someone would fix SSL so it wasn't 1:1 with IP addresses. Is anyone working > on that? > > (The idea I am toying with is quite a bit more convoluted, where the > HTTP-front-ends themselves are a dynamic p2p network and the network > supports mirroring and fail-over for static content - but if the basic > functionality isn't interesting then there is little point in me typing all > day.) > > Thoughts? Oh, also - does this already exist? :-) > Dont know the area that well, but interested if anyone knows of something. > > -- > Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson > [email protected] > http://bre.klaki.net/ > > Use http://bre.klaki.net/bre/contact.shtml to bypass my spam filters. > .oOo.oOo. PGP: 02764305, B7A3AB89 .oOo.oOo. >
