FreedomBox/Use Cases

From Wiki
< FreedomBox
Revision as of 11:41, 12 October 2019 by Joseph (talk | contribs) (Augment, not Upgrade)

The following are some ways in which FreedomBox can be used beyond its intended use case as a simple home server.
Also refer to WikiBooks:FreedomBox_for_Communities

System Administrator Delegate

FreedomBox doesn't always have to host a collections of applications. If the application is a big one, we might even a FreedomBox with just that application. In this case, FreedomBox is simply helping as a platform, for automatic installation, configuration, maintenance and security.

Things like diaspora* are really hard to install and maintain even for people with some amount of programming skill. FreedomBox can become the System Administrator delegate in a way.

Cluster of FreedomBox devices hosting the same apps

There are multiple apps on FreedomBox that store no state if the authentication and authorization are delegated to something like LDAP. If we can have a cluster of FreedomBoxes running the same applications and use a load balancer to share the load, then really large instances can be run with horizontal scaling.

Cluster of FreedomBox devices hosting one app each

This is another variation of the above, but simpler.
One FreedomBox serves as the identity server. Multiple FreedomBox servers act as app servers each hosting a single app administered by the FreedomBox system. There's a single point of entry into this system. Each application can be scaled differently. This kind of a setup can be used for large public deployments.

Pair of FreedomBoxes for censorship resistance

This was first mentioned by James Vasile in this video.
Alice and Bob are two FreedomBox users. Alice lives in a country where the internet is heavily censored by the government. Bob lives in a country where the internet is relatively less censored. Bob runs a Shadowsocks server on his FreedomBox which serves a web proxy for Alice who can now browse the internet freely by connecting the Shadowsocks client running on her FreedomBox to Bob's Shadowsocks server.

Augment, not Upgrade

When a FreedomBox user wants to get another FreedomBox device for some reason, it should augment the current FreedomBox. Upgrades shouldn't be about throwing away the current device to replace it with a new one. The services required by the user should be split across the two devices with the Apache server running on one of them serving as a reverse proxy to the services running on the other. (Still an idea, didn't try it out yet)