Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Equal Access [was Dropbox Limit Solution

[Henning Mortensen (hmortensen]

I have to say that in my investigation of solutions when we were looking
for our first, second and third systems, and even a potential fourth
system, we had to weigh cost, security and space. Here is our story.

We started out with a system called wiggio. It was terrific and combined
file storage with calendars and email. Alas the company that ran it decided
to close it down and concentrate on a paid platform. This first system
taught us that having an all in one system meant that we had mediocre
performance in all aspects. Our storage did not allow for security, the
calendar could not handle multiple calendars, only the email seemed
reasonable.

We were just investigating alternatives when we were told wiggio was
shutting down. We had decided to look for best of breed solutions, to file
storage, to calendar and to email group management. We found box.com which
allowed 10gb of free storage. The main problem with box was that you could
only set permissions at the root folder level, all lower levels inherit
permissions from the root. Box also did not have great editors to allow you
to edit files in place. This has gotten much better now, and box has apps
that enable editing. If you run out of space, just create another account
using a different email address. You can link the folders from your old
account to your new one. This will give you virtually unlimited space and
all for free.

For Calendars we use google calendars. The great thing about them is that
you can have multiple calendars. We have one for everyone, a guest room
calendar, a birthday calendar, and a common meal calendar. The trick to
using the google calendars is to set up a group in google groups and give
that group access to the calendar. That way adding new people is a matter
of adding them to the google group. There was a time when google groups was
only available for a paid account, but it seems to be working fine now.

That leaves emails. For this, the main need was for a way to set up group
email addresses. We found groups.io which is the child of the fellow that
invented yahoo groups back in the day. Groups.io allows me to create a
group with a main.groupname.groups.io email address. I can then create
subgroups for our various teams. Groups allow people to receive individual
emails or a daily digest. It also keeps a storage of all of the emails sent
which you can search to find that email that people missed or is great for
gathering the content of prior discussions. You only pay for storage of
your emails. So long as you can convince people to send links instead of
attaching files, you will never use up the free storage.

The third system takes the above and mashes in some google drive storage
for group editing. This has become a problem as these google drive files
are not available to everyone and we need to copy them to box.com to have a
record of what has been done/decided.

Our fourth system, the system which I would like to implement but which
people are not willing to learn, is a hosted NextCloud system which you can
self host or pay to have hosted. This pulls your data back under your own
control and ownership. When you store your data in cloud services like box,
google, dropbox and others, you do not own the data, they do. NextCloud
stores data on your servers, either physical or rented in the cloud and
therefore you retain ownership. NextCloud has unix based storage which
means you can limit security down to the individual file and an owning
group or individual.  Nextcloud has a calendaring option which allows use
of multiple calendars. It also has many apps. Some of my favourites are a
personal recipe book that keeps your recipes organized, a world internet
radio tuner, weather apps, photo organizer etc. If you can think of it,
likely someone else has already created an app to do it. Nextcloud is open
source and has an active community supporting it. Your data is secured with
encryption and you are managing your own system.

I run it as a virtual machine on our internal server.

<< ignore this next paragraph if you are not techy>>
Our internal server is a Dell Poweredge r410 which can be purchased on Ebay
for $300-$1000 depending on storage and memory. This server cost many
thousands when it was new. It is now past its supported life and as such is
sold for a pitance.  This server runs a free virtualization system called
Proxmox and allows me to run virtual machines that collect data, store it
in a database and then use a graphing solution called Grafana to display
nice graphs of how our boilers, Erv and pumps are operating. We even run a
windows machine virtually in order to run a piece of software that we need.
Everything gets backed up and sent to Amazon web services which stores the
last 3 months of backups of each of our virtual machines. We pay about
$1/month to save our backups offsite in this way. The one expense which is
hidden is the $150/year it costs in electricity to run the server. A newer
server would run on less, but these older machines have
incredible power/cost ratios. This is a computer which is running 24/7/365
and which has redundant power supplies, fans, cpu's, and memory. It even
has remote monitoring hardware so that I can monitor it from my home
computer. I can even turn it on or off remotely.

Wow, I got really into the weeds there. I hope one or two of you might find
interest in it. The bottom line is that there are many free services that a
community can use. There are limitations with all of them. The best system
is that which the community is able and willing to use.

Future exploration includes VPN services, PiHole to strip out
advertisements, and a community hosted Plex server.  I miss the exploration
part of my former IT career, I just don't miss the politics. Anyone doing
similar stuff that wants to share ideas?

Henning Mortensen
Prairie Spruce Commons, Regina Sk.




On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 2:30 PM Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> > On May 16, 2022, at 11:27 AM, <jmcarle [at] gmail.com> <jmcarle [at] 
> > gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > The community purchases a "Dropbox Professional" membership for
> $199/year +
> > tax.  It seems to allow one user to manage the 3TB of space, though users
> > with full access to both directories are able to access and save to it at
> > will.
>
> This is one of the limitations of many internet-based services — they
> limit access to 1-3 or so people. In cohousing, in the same way many
> communities have everyone on the Board, I like everyone to have access.
> Unless someone could destroy the system by making a mistake, shared
> ownership and access establishes equivalence and responsibility. It trusts
> everyone equally.
>
> When we were using Google Sites for our wiki, they changed the plan so
> only one person could be an owner. It made me feel very uncomfortable, and
> others as well, because it felt exclusive.
>
> I know one of the issues of access is security. If I am hosting dozens of
> hundreds of websites, then I have to be concerned about security for all
> the websites I host. But in terms of energy or complexity, how much is
> involved in allowing all the users to have access? In terms of watts or
> gigs or how ever you measure website intensity.
>
> Sharon
> ----
> Sharon Villines
> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> http://www.takomavillage.org
>
>
>
>
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