[Adminsysters] what the systerserver is about, in short

[Donna Metzlar]

Hi all,

For both new and old members on the list, a summary of the intiative.

I took a look in my email archive and found an email from 2004 to Toya
from Riseup, regarding a meeting in Antwerp organised by Laurence from
ConstantVZW. That year the Genderchangers group and Eclectic Tech
Carnival organisers decided to start running our own server. For the
feminist principle of Doing it Ourselves, to learn stuff and be able to
share our wealth with others. Over the years the server has changed from
physical to virtual machine, placed on office carpet to commercial data
hosting centre. Always hosting a website or two and being a playground
for learning sysadmin skills.

Today Jean, as she's called is a physical machine in a co-operative data
hosting centre in Graz, Austria. She hosts 3 services at the moment:

Mailman
Git
Mastadon (in progress)

And it is still a server where like minded people can get an account,
even a root account to learn new skills and help maintain the services
provided.

The machine was bought by pooling our resources. This particular modle
was chosen for being light on energy consumption! The server costs 120
euro pa, hosting fees to run, plus all our free and open manual labour.

Before Jean we had a VPS. We weren't really using it much but then one
of us wanted to install FreeSWITCH so that we would not have to use
Skype for meetings. With real-time communication timing is key, so we
needed a hardware clock and hence a real piece of hardware again.

We are at a point once more, where there seems to be a need for skill
sharing and hosting services. Next question is, shall we meet and make a
plan for the server, for the coming period?

Donna