Freedombox 2019-07-10
Continuing the theme of the cover feature, Mayank Sharma looks at a home server that helps decentralise common network tasks.
After writing the cover feature, Mayank
Sharma looks at a home server that helps decentralise common network tasks.
The goal of Freedombox is to replace as many privacyintruding third-party communication and file-sharing services as possible. To that end it includes several self-hosted open source alternatives that would be cumbersome to set up and configure by themselves.
However, they are bundled in Freedombox as ready-to-use apps that you can roll out with a single click. Once it’s up and running, you can use your Freedombox instance to run a messaging server, host conference calls, share and sync files, host a wiki and a lot more.
You can deploy Freedombox on a variety of platforms, and the project hosts images for various SBCS. If you lack any of the supported devices, you can also deploy Freedombox on a regular x86 computer, and can get started with ease using the virtual disk images that can be attached to a Virtualbox
VM. If you go via this route, you’ll have to first create a VM and then point it to the downloaded Freedombox virtual disk. Thanks to MDNS, you can boot the VM and head to https://freedombox.local to bring up the web interface. If that doesn’t work, refer to the Freedombox manual to use nmap on your network to discover the ports accepting connections.
Freedombox doesn’t have a default user and you’ll have to create one using its setup wizard which appears automatically after you’ve accepted the server’s selfsigned certificate. You can then use the same credentials to log into the VM.
Your own cloud
Despite its convenience, the VM image is probably best for evaluating the performance of Freedombox, not for long-term use. That’s because the disk image has a limited size and you’ll get ‘low disk storage’ warnings right from the get-go. A better alternative is to install the Freedombox server on a Debian installation – again, refer to its manual for the simple instructions.
Once the server is up and running you can easily activate services using the intuitive interface. You can then add users and enable them to interact with your privacy-respecting server from outside your local network as well. Note that to connect to most of the services from outside your local network, your Freedombox server must have a domain name. Refer to the section called “Host Nextcloud on your hardware” in our cover feature (page 42) to set up one via a Dynamic DNS service.
Another option is to use a service like Pagekite, which is integrated into Freedombox. Pagekite finds its way to your Freedombox using a combination of tunnels and reverse proxies. A third option for accessing your server from the internet is to activate Tor. Once you’ve installed the service using Freedombox’s web interface, it’ll spit out a .onion URL that identifies your server on the Tor network. Anyone on the internet can now get to your server by pasting this address into their Tor browser.
While both Freedombox and Nextcloud essentially help you to end your reliance on third-party dataaccumulating services by helping you host them on your own hardware, they both go about it differently. Freedombox takes pride in being a pure Debian blend, and only uses free and open source servers that you can find within the main Debian repository. Nextcloud, on the other hand, is essentially a file hosting and sharing service that takes on more functions thanks to its wide apps infrastructure.
The choice between the two boils down to a matter of preference, since both are straightforward to deploy and administer. The biggest strength of Freedombox is its reliance on mainstream open source servers and services, unlike Nextcloud’s custom apps.