Things have gotten a little busy on the work front so I haven’t gotten back to working on Nextcloud, but I came across a post about the FreedomBox so I went off on a small tangent. The aim of FreedomBox is designed to be an easy-to-setup-server for self-hosting applications which is privacy-centric. It can run on a single-board computer, in a VM, or on any hardware supported by Debian. You can even buy a small device pre-configured to run Freedom Box (Note: I’m not affiliated in any way with FreedomBox). I’ve heard of the Freedom Box before, but never had the extra hardware lying around to dedicate to it.

However, with Proxmox up and running it was surprisingly easy to create a new Debian-based container and follow the instructions for installing on Debian. A single command on a fresh Debian install was all that it took before I could launch a browser to setup the admin user using the secret code provided by the install. There are a number of interesting applications available for installation.

Several of the available applications were ones I was considering installing into Kubrnetes as individual services so this seems like a great way to try them out before I go through the effort of setting them up for “production” use.

FreeedomBox has applications for:

  • File Sharing
  • Bittorrent
  • Text and Voice Chat
  • Wiki
  • Blogging
  • Collaborative document editing
  • Minecraft clone
  • VPN
  • Privacy-centric web proxy
  • IRC client
  • Calendar / Addressbook
  • Email client
  • Web search engine
  • SOCKS proxy
  • Link Shortener
  • Distributed File Server
  • Dropbox clone
  • Tor client

Now I just need to figure how to make the Kubernetes nginx-ingress reverse proxy requests to the FreedomBox which is on the “DMZ”, but not a service in Kubernetes. It would also be nice to have it support single sign-on. Baby steps, I guess.