Free as in freedom - setting up our infrastructure

Workspaces Spot the Future Romania
,
16

Thanks! Here’s how I understand it…

Thanks for your insights and kindness, @TCT, very good to meet you. My name is Alberto, a long-time edgeryder.

So: we do have a virtual machine with dedicated cores, but not with Ecobytes – we are hosted by a German company called EuroHosting or something like that. We only met Ecobytes later: @Matthias has decided that a migration was not worth the investment. Perhaps we will take the chance of the next major overhaul of the website to migrate.

As an “advanced Muggle” (don’t develop, can code a little for data manipulation purposes, but not afraid of learning to use tools), I would like to throw in my point of view in this super-interesting discussion, and see what you guys think – that means also @Darren, @mstn and @trythis.

There are two types of extended functionalities: those that are linked to a cultural change (normally the relationship is not one-way: they require cultural change, but at the same time they induce it too), and those that don’t. A markdown editor does not require cultural change, as long as it can be added to WYSIWYG as an extra option; so each person can use the editor she prefers. Getting people to really use wikis, or issue tracking functionalities, or crypto, that’s another story. The power of those tools are in people using them together and at the same time; even within a small community like ours, their value increases superlinearly with the number of users. No point using encrypted mail if none of your friends can receive an encrypted message!

I propose that any tool being rolled out within Edgeryders – if it is connected with cultural change – should come with an explicit effort to (1) explain to the community why they should care about the tool and (2) campaign tirelessly for adoption, over a sustained period of time. By “explicit” here I mean this: that one or more people take personal responsibility for leading the effort.

When @msanti, @danohu and I, at 31C3, fell in love with the Community Crypto idea, the deal was this: they (the geeks) would offer technical support to any edgeryder wanting to embrace it. I would write the instructable, act as alpha tester (if I can do it, anyone can!) and promote community crypto corners at all Edgeryders events. I would be the adoption champion.

That project is stagnating because we could not get Mailpile to work with the edgeryders.eu SMTP server, despite much banging our heads on the wall and pleading with the Mailpile development team (I recently saw that the blog seems to be active again, so maybe there is more hope now). But I stand for the approach: I would hate to waste precious developer time to roll out tools that no one uses… what does everyone think?

1 Like
17

Agree

I’d agree with all that Alberto.

Of course some people may love their propriety (often, but not always) shinier alternative tools and still like to use them.  Hopefully by making new tools visible on the ER platform, using them for collaborative work and rolling out an education/promotion effort (online and IRL is nice)  we may be able to create more of a ‘culture’ around use of FLOSS tools.

I’ve notice unMonastery has similar goals, and would imagine there would support / collaboration from the Ecobytes collective (?)

I think it would be nice if the ER website revamp could be an opportunity for ER to shift servers over and join the development of Ecobytes.

2 Likes
18

Shifting servers

Emphatically agree, @Darren. We are within spitting distance of actually starting the much-vaunted revamping – even though last word, as always, goes to @Matthias, since he is the one that ends up having to do the work. We can hire someone, of course, but still it would be Matt doing much of the task writing. But yes, if we do that it would be the perfect opportunity to set up a dev server directly with Ecobytes, while activity goes on with the present incarnation of the site and the present server. When we are ready to go, we move to production, redirect and we are in business.

19

Ceata can try to help with Mailpile

Thank you for the warm welcome, @Alberto. Ceata can try to help you fix your Mailpile instance(s). And @Noemi is interested in joining Ceata for a crypto event.

2 Likes
20

Yess!!

Gosh this would be lovely, getting ourselves off the google mail and being able to offer community members @edgeryders.eu addresses running on mailpile.

1 Like
21

That’s generous!

Wow, @TCT, that would be so cool. In return, I commit to writing a careful step-by-step guide (in English only) to installing Mailpile, creating and sharing keys etc. in the Edgeryders context.

If and when you have time to help, I would ask you to join the Community Crypto project and assign to yourself this task:

https://edgeryders.eu/en/community-crypto/task-4958

It contains a link to the github issue I opened (and the Mailpile guys closed without solving the problem). I recall @almereyda also tried to help – I believe he knows the Mailpile code base not as well as Bjarni, but way better than us.

22

Back on keyboard

and had to drag the notification out of spam (about 1/3 rd go there) - that’s why I am so late commenting. It is not lack of interest. Will get around to this in a day or two.

On first skim: general agreement.

23

Puzzle piece I recently found

Is OBS - it is originally intended to stream into the net while playing video games. Now this is not something that we’ll start doing tomorrow. But once we get serious with social network analysis and navigation, I imagine the interface will be so information dense that we won’t be looking at a couple of static lines but be seriously immersed into the network, similar to a rather weird coop-multiplayer game.

Within 1-2 hours of “playing” you’ll cover what now needs 1-2 weeks in terms of getting background info/and advanced sociograms of projects. It’s going to be very mixed media, and it’ll likely have a certain learning curve to it as well - this is why the sort of piggybacking that streaming allows is relatively fundamental. Not to mention that already today this could really boost local/global hybrid meetings, and document a lot of the effort, especially in combination with a hackpad.

1 Like
24

For collaborative synchronous writing its got to be etherpad (what framasoft use) although unlike google word docs there is no notation/comment function.

co-ment is probably a nicer option when documents are being worked on over time, or for more complex/contentious documents.  Works more like a wiki with versions, rather than live text appearing as you type.  It does allow notation/comments which work like discussion threads with email notifications, if someone wants to discuss your note.

I dont know much about it, or if it would be suitable, but your discussions about document sharing, made me think of syncthing, know actively being developed and heard people bigging it up.

Looking at the syncthing website the way they do their documentation using git looks cool - although I dont understand how git works (I’m not a coder).

Someone was also worrying about the direction of bit torrent sync

If there was still the idea of moving onto the ecobytes servers at some stage I guess it would be good to ask some devs/admins from there if they have any ideas or are working on anything? Think I remember @gandhiano @almereyda being involved??

gandhiano

1 Like
25

After checking the proposals in the blog post

Go for it:

ownCloud Server from ownCloud.org

Might be okay:

Tahoe-LAFS - security audit needed

MaidSafe - security audit needed

Avoid at all costs:

rollApp.com - SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute); has privacy issues, too

ownCloud.com - SaSS, proprietary components, has privacy issues

Symform.com - privacy issues, proprietary clients, no public API

BitTorrent Sync - proprietary software

References:

SaaSS - Who Does That Server Really Serve? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

Proprietary Software - Proprietary Software - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

1 Like
26

Thank you :slight_smile:

For taking the time to do this, much appreciated. So what would you need to be able to set up an owncloud installation for Edgeryders?

Also, you mentioned Mailpile?

I’d like to run a community project called the great escape in which we do exactly what Alberto suggested above, use the tools, and advocate for them over a longer period of time. B.J’s Behavioral Change model could be a good framework within which to design activities/communication, test their effectiveness and then learn over time from them. Paper here: http://bjfogg.com/fbm_files/page4_1.pdf 

27

Owncloud

@almereyda has been setting up a few owncloud instances on our servers and I’m sure he could help you there. Also Indiehosters Pierre is serving OwnClouds on own infrastructures for a low cost.

1 Like
28

Collaborative writing tools

I’ve noticed that own cloud has a collaborative writing tool, which interestingly didnt appear to be a etherpad fork, but from what I remember its fairly basic.

This conversation, which I think includes some of Ecobytes, just came onto my radar and details a more advances option http://discourse.transformap.co/t/tools-for-collaborative-writing/172

29

sandstorm.io

Hi all, I think this project could be on topic for this thread https://sandstorm.io/. I do not know if it is production ready, but in the last months they have made a huge progress. Something to keep an eye on. Technically, it requires a linux machine (I tried on Ubuntu some time ago) with a recent kernel (at least 3.x). I could help if you want, but I am not strong as sysadmin. In other words I should be able to setup a working instance, but I cannot promise anything on security side.

30

It comes with Mailpile!!!

@mstn, what a great great catch! It really looks like an idiot-proof system (I tried installing a couple of apps and they Just Worked).  Plus, it comes with Mailpile! I do not have time now to do an extensive testing with keys and all, but I tried to send unencrypted mail from the sandstorm demo account and it works a charm. Looks like you do not even have to set up the routes for sending and receiving mail in Mailpile. In fact, it seems you cannot do it… which is not great.

Marco, how would it work if we ran it from our own server? Would we be able to configure email addresses a little less silly than slkrmtqn1mh5pask5j0f@demo.sandstorm.io ?

Also: @danohu, @msanti, take note!

31

I do not know if the project is ready for production. It should be soon, but I have not found any roadmap (actually I didn’t do much research).

About email it should require some configuration for the hosting machine (it doesn’t seem too difficult), as far I can see here Email - Docs. Outgoing emails use an external smtp server, which could be not ideal in your philosophy, but if the external server is just a dispatcher and all the encryption is done within sandstorm it should be ok.

Yes, it should be possible to use sensible names for emails. I do not know how, but I can find it out.

You should have a look at their access permission system: User authentication & permissions - Docs. It is… unconventional. I am not sure to have understood it.

By the way one of their developers should attend Chaos Communication Camp this year. Just spotted on Twitter.

1 Like
32

Ok so how to move forward?

Hi @TCT and all.

Now it seems we have some kind of rough consensus around what is needed, and some options for what to use to meet those needs I suggest we close the “exploration” part of this thread after Alberto’s comment about sandstorm.

Can we agree on a roadmap for what to do/build? Maybe even set some milestones/define tasks with dates?

33

Building up federated infrastructure and services

@alberto thanks for the mention of Ecobytes and @elf-pavlik for pinging me on this thread.

Ecobytes has been making efforts in the last 1-2 years for building up a federated infrastructure, after 8 years of hosting collectives on own infrastructure (or partially, since the baremetal is still rented).

This is no easy task, as unfortunately many are still locked in the “our” as a competitive thing, or sometimes it is just that the technical implementations that one or another collective has followed, makes it hard for cooperation to start. Nevertheless, as the needs of everyone are basically the same and the advantage of federating for scaling up is obvious, there have been major progresses on this and several talks and cooperation with different projects and collectives are undergoing - IndieHosters, unMonastery, TransforMap, plantei.eu, Framasoft, networks on degrowth, transition and community supported agriculture (from where we also get big inspiration for our funding and development model), to name a few.

Mail is for example one of the priorities we have at the moment and 2 people in the collective are working on looking up the different possibilities and preparing for a deployment on the next Hackathon, planned for Witzenhausen on August 24th to 28th - maybe some of you would want to join? Mail is one of those emblematic cases where, due to the hassle involved in setting up and the need for reliability, esp. regarding all the spam-related stuff, it makes all sense to build something together.

A second Hackathon is also being planned for Budapest on October 14th to 18th, probably more focused on getting web services and tools for the communities - the hackathon is taking place motivated by the efforts to build up the technological infrastructure and services for the next international degrowth conference. A collaboration on platforms like Drupal (and their hosting) would make sense here.

For those who are found of IRC, you can usually find at least some of us hanging on ircs.indymedia.org #ecobytes.

The only way to survive the feet of the giant is to get all us small ants working together: http://degooglisons-internet.org/

34

Hackathon

Here is the link for the next hackathon: Ecobytes Summer Hackathon in group ecobytes | Ecobytes

35

Skype recordings

Here is another little program that may help with documenting our skype calls:

http://atdot.ch/scr/2010/07/experimental-windows-version/#comments

That was just a 5 minute search, and I haven’t tested it yet. Perhaps someone can check this out?

@jediknight ?