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Is there a way to run e.g. an email server on Sandstorm? Last time I looked it seemed like that would never be supported because it would violate the sandstorm

Is there a way to run e.g. an email server on Sandstorm? Last time I looked it seemed like that would never be supported because it would violate the sandstorm business model, which, as I understand it, appears to be selling very cheap hosting of grains, made possible because only disk resources are used when an grain is not currently in use. This would seem preclude the hosting of services that need to be running all the time in the background.

dwrensha 10y ago
Yes, it should be possible to run an email server as a Sandstorm grain. Note that you would need to grant the grain networking capabilities so that it could talk to the outside world. Currently, only the admins of a Sandstorm server are allowed to grant such capabilities, but that will change once we've implemented our plans for trusted "driver apps" that attenuate and manage admin capabilities. A grain can keep itself running in the background by requesting a wakelock from its Sandstorm supervisor process. While the grain holds the wakelock, it does not get automatically spun down, even if there are no users visiting it.
kentonv 10y ago
Sandstorm's business model is selling enterprise-oriented add-ons and support (e.g. ability to integrate with LDAP/SAML/Active Directory, or (eventually) providing HIPAA compliance, etc.). The hosting service actually exists more so that developers know that their apps are usable by everyone, not just people who run their own server. There's actually no need for a mail server to be always-on. It could start up whenever a message arrives. Sandstorm is good at this kind of on-demand starting. We very much intend to support using Sandstorm as your email server. It turns out, though, that e-mail is a complicated subject which operates on a different set of protocols from the rest of the web (SMTP vs. HTTP) and has a whole lot of hairy stuff you need to do to make it actually work (SPF, DKIM, ...). Since there are quite a few options out there already for handling email, we've chosen to focus elsewhere in the short term, but I hope to loop back to email in the coming months.

dwrensha 10y ago

Yes, it should be possible to run an email server as a Sandstorm grain. Note that you would need to grant the grain networking capabilities so that it could talk to the outside world. Currently, only the admins of a Sandstorm server are allowed to grant such capabilities, but that will change once we've implemented our plans for trusted "driver apps" that attenuate and manage admin capabilities. A grain can keep itself running in the background by requesting a wakelock from its Sandstorm supervisor process. While the grain holds the wakelock, it does not get automatically spun down, even if there are no users visiting it.

kentonv 10y ago

Sandstorm's business model is selling enterprise-oriented add-ons and support (e.g. ability to integrate with LDAP/SAML/Active Directory, or (eventually) providing HIPAA compliance, etc.). The hosting service actually exists more so that developers know that their apps are usable by everyone, not just people who run their own server. There's actually no need for a mail server to be always-on. It could start up whenever a message arrives. Sandstorm is good at this kind of on-demand starting. We very much intend to support using Sandstorm as your email server. It turns out, though, that e-mail is a complicated subject which operates on a different set of protocols from the rest of the web (SMTP vs. HTTP) and has a whole lot of hairy stuff you need to do to make it actually work (SPF, DKIM, ...). Since there are quite a few options out there already for handling email, we've chosen to focus elsewhere in the short term, but I hope to loop back to email in the coming months.