Your Own Private Idaho

In my last blog entry I talked about how the Kerika storage server works in general, and I concluded by pointing out that we are in the privacy business, not the advertisement business!

And if you value your privacy, I have some great news: we are close to releasing our storage server software as a separate product! This means that you will be able to run your own private storage server, on any machine that you have that's reliably connected to the Internet. You don't even need to have a fixed IP address for running this server -- just make sure that:

1. You hook it up using an Ethernet cable, not wireless, since wireless connections can be flaky.
   


2. Don't let your computer doesn't go to sleep overnight, which would make your server inaccessible. (This can usually be done by setting your power management features on your computer to not let it go to sleep due to inactivity.)


3. And, finally, make sure you have an updated Java environment for the server computer, which is as easy as visiting www.java.com.

Setting up your own private storage server will provide great privacy: now you can be sure your project files and Idea Pages never leave the "ring of trust" that consists of your machine, your buddies' machines, and your private storage server. If you update a shared item and some of your buddies are not online, these updates will wait for them at your private storage server, not the public server at Kerika's data center. In effect, you will be able to run "dark" networks that are not easily visible from the outside.

Every storage server can be configured to work in two modes: Open and Restricted. The public storage server at Kerika's data center runs in Open mode, which means that it will allow any users anywhere to connect to it.

If you run your server in Restricted mode, you can control just who else can use the server. There are a couple of ways in which you can do this:

1. Specify individual Kerika IDs that go on the "Allowed" list.


2. Specify an entire domain, which means that any Kerika ID that is based upon that domain is automatically added to the "Allowed" list. For example, if you are running a company called Acipio, you could add "acipio.com" to the Allowed list. This would allow joe@acipio.com and mary@acipio.com and arjun@acipio.com (and so on) to connect to the server. Anyone whose ID does not end with "@acipio.com" would not be able to connect to the server.

And even when you allow an entire domain, you can also maintain a separate "Prohibited" list where you single out individual Kerika IDs that you don't want to allow. For example, you could add "acipio.com" to the Allowed list and simultaneously add arjun@acipio.com to the Prohibited list, which means that everyone whose ID ends in "@acipio.com" -- except for arjun@acipio.com -- would be able to connect to the storage server.

Pretty darn nifty, if you ask me...