Develop and sell a "roku" like cloudron box.
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@girish I think you are right concerning the apps. The hardware is easy imo. You can source "cheap" price but decently made fanless mini pc's like the kind represented by the procteli. The hard part is the app side and the domain registration configuration side. It would need to be super super easy so "aunt jessy" can figure it out and be up in running within 10-15 mins. But man if someone could do that, I really think they'd make a killing. Adguard, rocketchat(or similiar) nexcloud, and some photo sharing app and family calendar. call it the "family connection package" lol
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Let's say the Cloudron box takes off. What would consumers need to do to get it "online" at their home? Any ports to open with the ISP or would this all work by default?
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@humptydumpty It would definitely require port forwarding I would think.
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So we are back at square one! Promote Cloudron as the best solution for those interested and capable of setting it up. Or, as some are offering, don't paying for a managed Cloudron. I would imagine though that the selling point would have to be spot on... but what is the selling point? Privacy? Data control? Ease of use? Backups?
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@scooke the selling point would be data ownership, privacy, connectivity etc. I know a lot of family members who would absolutely love to share and use the environment that cloudron offers. With the productivity apps, the media apps, the communication platforms etc. Yet they lack the tech skills to build a server and self host or host at a VPS. A pre setup ready to go box that requires minimal setup on user part like registering a domain and maybe forwarding a port or two would be golden. I do agree though that the software isn't there yet and neither is the security. My home hosted cloudron actually gets 'attacked' multiple times daily. Those security features would have to be squared away big time to make it wide consumer product.
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@mastadamus said in Develop and sell a "roku" like cloudron box.:
and maybe forwarding a port or two would be golden
Don't forget that more and more residential internet connections don't get a public ip any more (keyword cgnat). Plus forwarding ports can still be quite a challenge for the technically challenged. If you want to make it easy for everyone you would need some sort of proxying service that would provide a public endpoint for these users.
@mastadamus said in Develop and sell a "roku" like cloudron box.:
My home hosted cloudron actually gets 'attacked' multiple times daily
That is most likely the usual background chatter that will happen once you expose a service to the public internet. Could as well be mitigated if you don't expose directly, but only through a third party.
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@fbartels most of it is, some of it isn't unfortunately. Especially on my WordPress site. I have a WAF running and I get quite a few legit complex style and brute force attacks blocked every month. Also I get attempted tls heartbleed attacks fairly routinely thats stopped by my ips.
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@mastadamus I imagine that would result in a support nightmare for them considering not everyone who has internet is technically literate, unfortunately.
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@atrilahiji prob so.
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I have some potential significant sponsorship interest in this if we could assemble enough people to build.
Also worth a look for inspiration: https://www.odoo.com/app/iot
What do you all recommend as fanless boxes to base this sort of thing?
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@marcusquinn there's a ton out there. I bet it could be cheaper if you had a contract for bulk and care less about looks.
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Recent project doing something similar. I am wondering however how they really want to make this effortless for everybody. Especially since this centers on nextcloud.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nextbox/nextbox-your-own-private-cloud-for-home-and-office
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@mastadamus Nice, of course I should have searched first but wondered what people here used. I suppose anything could be co-branded with some laser etching.
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@fbartels Interesting, although to go mass market they could do with some work on their branding and presentation.
Roku completely nails branding and presentation, and Sky TV / Now TV are the kings of branding and packaging in the UK.
I feel as a Consumer / Pro appliance it would need a little more curation on the apps where the best for each area were pre-configured, and there would need to be preferred partners setup for certain links (Domain/DNS/Backups) but I could see this being packaged as a box that people put alongside their main TV in homes and in their IT cupboard in offices.
@Mastadamus Maybe we can coin a new phrase: "cloud-cutters"
@girish @nebulon I do think the term "Private Cloud" should be used as the primary explanatory catch-phrase across your branding and presentation, and make "Self-Hosting" secondary because that is a little more intimidating.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@fbartels said in Develop and sell a "roku" like cloudron box.:
keyword cgnat
Carrier-grade NAT - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT -
@marcusquinn I agree emphasizing "Private Cloud" is a very good idea, everybody can get a feel for what it is, even if they have no idea of how.
I mean, the general public doesn't even know what hosting is.^^"
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So this is something that I have been contemplating for about a month now.
My thoughts are this, you get a Nuc that supports Vtx/vtd and then you install proxmox on the device. Then set up opnsense as one vm, and cloudron as another.
Then do all the heavy lifting for the user ( could be a templates image installed to make this process much faster) and make it so they just have to plug and play and use the service.
An additional income stream could be a subscription based support level
