George Bekiaridis's position paper

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Hey Dude - Where's my Data

Position Paper

George Bekiaridis, ERGON kek

Last years digital content production has been increased dramatically because almost everybody is using tools (hardware and software) that support rapid digital content creation (i.e. digital cameras, mobile phones, software for image and video editing etc). At the same time there is an increased demand for sharing this digital content through services like flickr.

Why we are using services like flickr?

The answer is because we want a fast, reliable and free web space to put our content online accepting that companies running those services sell information based on our browsing habits of that digital content. Trying to see above the scene the business model of these services is based on the fact that individuals haven’t the bandwidth (money to buy it), skills and time to run such a service by themselves.

Let’s try to analyze the above barriers. Bandwidth is becoming more and more cheaper through broadband connections. Lack of skills and time is an issue but what if we have a plug and play device easy to setup and run such a service for ourselves?

The idea I’m trying to describe in this paper is everybody to run his own server where digital content and services (i.e. e-portfolios) are stored and run.

To establish a service like this we need a server, bandwidth, an IP or a domain name and software.

As a server we can use our own computer but if we want 24/7 availability the computer must be online and turned on always. Few days ago an advertisement email arrived in my inbox and it was for a product called Disk Station. The text was starting as “Time to redefine how you share, how you store, and how you connect your data.” Looking at the web site Disk Station is a portable server which has some interesting features copied from product’s web site.

Share More Than just Data Disk Station integrates so many features you could ever think of in a Home & SOHO environment. It shares data, printer, photo, web, multimedia files and more! Having a Disk Station is connecting all your digital contents. It makes sharing everything easy yet controllable.

Program Your Own Web Creating your own web site is always a fun thing to do. Disk Station now supports PHP+MySQL. You are free to construct your own web site with dynamic web contents, or to install PHP open source applications from the Internet, such as blog and bulletin board,

Let the Music Play If you have cool photos, music, and movies, why not share them out? You simply upload the files to Disk Station, hook up a Network Media Player, and you can start enjoying them with your TV or audio set.

Total Backup Solutions Data backup is so important but people tend to ignore it, Disk Station makes data backup so complete and automatic that backup always be done without your attention. From Network Backup to Local Backup, from USB Copy to PC Backup (Synology Data Replicator II), you can always find the backup alternatives that fit your needs.

Share Photos with Right Persons Having trouble to share your photos with right persons? Photo Station lets you not only share them with friends through the Internet, but also control who should be able to view which photo albums. You are now the master of your shared photos.

A piece of hardware like Disk Station seems to be a good solution to run our server.

Looking at wikipedia for ADSL speeds you can see that upload speeds average in today’s available connections is 1.0 Mbit/s. This amount of bandwidth is enough to run a server with up to 5 simultaneous connections. I have to notice also that ADSL2 speeds will be much higher, so in the future will have more available bandwidth.

The next issue is how people reach our server. Most of us have a dynamic IP so every time connection resets we have a new IP. A free service called Dynamic DNS allows you to alias a dynamic IP address to a static hostname.

Finally we need software to run a web server, e-portfolio, blog etc. Disk Station I mentioned above has a built in web server with PHP and MySQL support. For other applications you can find plenty of available open source applications on the internet.

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