[Owncloud] Re: GSOC brainstorming.

[Bugsbane]

While this is a feature used more when people are running OwnCloud from 
a server at home, than when they upload to a webhost, Hasanat is correct 
that this would be very, very useful. Tonido (who could be considered a 
competitor) works in this way. Because of the NAT hole punching, they 
can make it super easy to get running from home with just a .deb / .rpm, 
create a username / password, and you're ready to go in minutes. Compare 
this to something like Diaspora which doesn't (yet) use this kind of 
technology and thus took me many, many hours of quite in depth, 
technical testing to get working. Average users aren't going to know 
about port forwarding their router (most of which are different, making 
instruction hard) and securing the result.

> I am suggesting to implement NAT hole punching so that server can be
> accessed if it doesn't have an open ip.
> This is a common scenario that home servers are behind router and can
> not be accessed from out side world plus having a dedicated IP at home
> is a costly business. I don't think there should be a doubt regarding
> importance of this feature.
>
> How can this be implemented:
> We basically
> 1. need a tracker server
> 2. a client side software (running at both owncloud server and client machines)
>
> But if everyone needs to download a software to access his/her files,
> the whole point of accessing though browser (the current state) is
> lost.
>
> So we can mold it and make it work like this:
> We will need to host a service at our end which basically mirrors your
> server, e.g. by accessing  http://my-home-server@owncloud-tracker.org,  my
> home server opens in browser. Multiple servers can be served from
> single tracker server. The point to notice is that tracker stills has
> no idea about my personal files as it can't read them. So one can
> safely use someone else's tracker server. I doubt if own-cloud will
> have enough resources to host trackers for others.
>
> (If you guys let me do this in this year's SOC, i'll set a tracker
> server for you guys on amazon for one year :P )
>
> I am open to criticism and suggestions.
>