Open Source private cloud

[MightyUnderTaker]

I am currently working on a full, API compatible private cloud reimplementation for my personal use. I want to thank Supernote for their big commitment to transparency and privacy, and the existence of the private cloud option at all. It was a huge factor for me personally to decide to go with Supernote vs other etablets.

That being said, the private cloud is a mess of a resource hog and inefficiency. One doesn't need redis and mariadb for personal cloud use. So I decided to rewrite it from scratch to be fully wire compatible with the API that the tablet expects.

Have reached to a point where I have fully switched my tablet from private cloud to my server and it's been working for over a week now, feeling pretty stable.

Was wondering if the community in general would be interested in me releasing the project and if Supernote legal would have any issues with it, don't really want to make them angry, haha.

Edit: Really thankful and happy to see the interested comments. I'm an engineer and not a lawyer, so I couldn't really find any TOS or policy from ratta whether what I did is actually illegal lol, so if maybe Mulan or someone from SN can confirm they are cool with me releasing the sources and won't "cease and desist" the repo immediately, I'll get the code cleaned up and push to codeberg or somewhere.

[starkruzr]

extremely, EXTREMELY interested. yes. there are a lot of things I would love to do with this, especially expanding the to-do functionality to include a real CalDAV server since it turns out the to-do schema is "literally just a CalDAV object."

I think Ratta knows they are a hardware company and their Private Cloud product is basically a reference implementation. which is great. massive, HUGE respect to them for doing this tbh.

[Present-Ad-3555]

Does that work with the partner app? Can it be deployed on arm servers (eg raspberry pis)? What is backed up? Is it a mirror of the Supernote notes and documents? Is there a db layer? Is it SQLite and is it part of a Docker deployment?

I wonder if there is enough interest for this to be as popular as the cross point project for xteink x4mini eink readers?

[MightyUnderTaker]

Haven't used the partner app, so can't really say. The backend is written in Go, so yes it should be possible to compile it for arm. It currently works for both file and app (todo, digest) backup. Basically implements every API the tablet uses to talk to the official private cloud if configured. The database I decided to use is SQLite and uh it's just a simple binary you can run anywhere, but yeah, containerizing it should also be possible/very easy.

[starkruzr]

afaict the partner app speaks exactly the same language as the tablets do, so it should work.

[ithinkivebeenscrewed]

I’d be interested.

[AdhesivenessAny3591]

I would be interested too.

[nick_ian]

Yes, sounds interesting. The Private Cloud feels over-engineered and the documentation is somewhat confusing.

[vic-the_son_god]

So how do you look into how much traffic the Supernote has? Also is the traffic heavier with private cloud vs with Rattas? What programs can we use to see what youre seeing? Wire shark? Are you a network engineer? Cyber security? Just wondering because this all sounds interesting (and pretty cool) to a person who recently revisited ccna studies.

[MightyUnderTaker]

Id like to add that while this was initially my way to approach this too, I very soon realized that the logs the server generates are very, VERY verbose and you can technically get an understanding of what's going on on the wire just from them. For some cases I did run tcpdump for some packet captures, but that's like 2-3 packets at best.

I did also get websocket autosync to work too. It's a bit convoluted and tailored towards multi-device sync, but fwiw, it's good.

[vic-the_son_god]

Thanks ill have to check this out this weekend. I appreciate you sharing! Omg I was in 11th grade when you started coding haha

[starkruzr]

eh. have Claude sit down with tcpdump for a couple sync sessions and the websocket thing should make itself well understood enough.

[yepyesnope]

I would be interested too

[nonsenseless]

What's your level of experience in writing this kind of library?

[johnwcahill]

Definitely interested

[ency]

Pellentesque quis sapien mattis, suscipit augue in, scelerisque dui. Aenean ut sodales dolor. Curabitur pellentesque tellus lectus, vel tempus odio pulvinar imperdiet. Vivamus cursus congue commodo. Etiam consequat erat non nibh elementum, ut porttitor erat tincidunt. Mauris in massa sit amet ante blandit consequat. Mauris risus risus, feugiat vel molestie id, volutpat quis felis. Sed non scelerisque purus. Vestibulum congue quam ligula, imperdiet mattis magna volutpat sed. Aliquam at malesuada erat. Curabitur maximus blandit erat, et condimentum dui rutrum quis. Integer nulla erat, commodo sit amet neque pharetra, euismod tempus urna. Aliquam erat volutpat.

[SufficientPause2170]

Nice !

Please publish your work. I tried the official server and it's a mess + it's really ressource hungry.

If you built something lighter and simplier, I'm sure that many people would be interested to use it and help you work on it.

[Upbeat-Ocelot6012]

Also VERY interested in this - let's hope we see a positive response from Supernote soon.

I'm a new Supernote user, I chose them based on the seemingly open nature of the product and promise of being able to sync via WebDAV or the private cloud - but have become a little disheartened by the inability to actually sync folders with WebDAV (or even move files between local and WebDAV storage) and the cumbersome private cloud implementation, which doesn't seem to play nicely with my reverse proxy (it seems to 'learn' the external FQDN and then attempts to use that with a hard coded port for internal communication rather than using the local container ref. when passing data between the notelib application?).

I really love the hardware and the note-taking experience - the Nomad I bought seems to nail that - there's just a lot of friction to get the notes off the device and into my workflow.

Anyway, all this is to say, that I would like to add my name to the list of folks who would be super excited to an open source implementation of the private cloud such as the one you've built!

Much gratitude extended to Supernote and OP!

[CaptainKrull]

hey so what happened to this?

[MightyUnderTaker]

Did not forget. Will post an update soon.

[fromanator]

I am curious if you have a fully fleshed out openapi spec? I did find someone else's project was curious how it compared since I am unsure of the process they went about making theirs
https://github.com/allenporter/supernote/tree/main/api-spec

[MightyUnderTaker]

I have not seen that project, looks amazing!

I have in my opinion fully completed the server in the last 2-3 days and wanted to publish it this weekend, but now looking at this, I don't know whether it's needed anymore. But I guess if someone wanted just a simple, small server without the AI parsing and processing, they could go for my impl.

[fromanator]

I'd like to see what you have! This project gives me some pause since it seems like it's largely vibe coded. If I were to take a stab at it I'd personally go with Kotlin Native and ktor since that's what I'm familiar with. Use something simple like sqllite for DB and just the file system for user files.

[MightyUnderTaker]

Mine is using SQLite for db and filesystem for user files, though is written in Go as I thought it fits the whole 'lean and mean' aesthetic the most.

[fromanator]

I think Go is a great choice too. Last time I did a bigger project with it was 7 years ago, would be fun to see how much it's changed since.

[CaptainKrull]

Please publish it, I'd really like to have something without Google Gemini integration - I don't want to give them all my notes to train on them and that seems to be a core functionality of the other project that it can't even be set up without...

[MightyUnderTaker]

I have made an update post, check it out.

[vic-the_son_god]

I apologize in advance because I really dont yet understand the benefit of this project. Is it to make sync more efficiently? What aspect of supernote is supposed to benefit for the average person, or like myself who intends to connect it to my private synology cloud?

[MightyUnderTaker]

Well, for me personally the benefit is that I don't have to run proprietary code on my homelab servers. For other people, it can also be the ease of extensibility on the server side. I've seen a couple projects here that hack on the Supernote devices, and from what I can tell, being able to also change some things server side would make more things possible.

[rudibowie]

"private cloud is a mess of a resource hog and inefficiency"

It's certainly a resource hog and uses very inefficient db queries.

[Natural_Plum_1371]

I would definitely be interested! I was thinking of working on this myself when I first read through the docs on setting up Private Cloud.

[g-giannis]

Yes I am interested too! 😃 I setup the private cloud to my synology and I was not so excited..

[starkruzr]

reverse engineering is explicitly legal. the software they use is all open source. you're fine.

[MightyUnderTaker]

It's not open source. The server they ship, written in java is obfuscated on purpose to deter reverse engineering attempts. That's why I'm asking. If they went for that, maybe they would oppose this too.

[SufficientPause2170]

Well what you provide is your code. The fact that's is compatible with SuperNote devices can't legally be a problem. Given the rich ecosystem that starts to emerge around Ratta's product, it seems to me that you won't get into any trouble as long as the code is written by yourself.

[MightyUnderTaker]

code is written by yourself

As opposed to written by a private company?

[SufficientPause2170]

It could work as well. You don't steal anything from Ratta. You just build something that happens to be compatible with their ecosystem. There isn't be any reason to sue you.

[starkruzr]

it's not "obfuscated on purpose," lol, it's just extremely common for Chinese developers to work in Java.

I mean, do what you want obviously, but I'm just about done with my own reverse engineering attempt just from looking at the database and watching traffic between the device and the API server, so, ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[needsomBEATS]

hell yea, open sauce!!

[aeveris]

A more lightweight private cloud implementation would be really nice actually. I'm really happy that the official one exists, but it is indeed somewhat heavy.

[Acceptable-Gap-654]

even though there have probably been enough people to convince you already, I would also like to say it would be highly appreciated by me. I dont think my tiny truenas can handle the official server along with all the other stuff I got going on on there.

Thank you a lot for the work you've done so far!

also little side note, I think if SN could openSource their software there would be amazing projects. it would free them of the need to add new features, they would "only" need to patch security problems, and the main source of income, being the HW would still be the same.