[Adminsysters] Fwd: servepub.net - building own infrastructure

[cellarspoon at riseup.net]

Hey all!

This sounds pretty exciting!

I'm personally interested to attend in person if a physical space will
be organised and use the 250 GBP budget to cover costs. Had been
planning to visit London in anyway... if you can let me know asap I can
try get cheap trains/boats organised.

I'm happy to participate in whatever task division is set up. I think
the process looks covered in the 1 through 5. I'm not sure on the order
of things and also what In-grid / Systerserver folks would prefer to
do?

And for the 2 hr presentation, is this a space to work on the 1-5 tasks
or just a more general present/discuss moment about self-hosting /
maintenance / etc. or?

I can imagine doing some hands on review / exploration of fundamentals
might be beneficial? We wrote some stuff with Varia and friends some
time ago https://homebrewserver.club/category/fundamentals.html

Some further thoughts:

- Do we know who will be taking care of this going forward? Will they
be able to physically attend? That would be best to increase the
chances that there is a good "handover"

- I think there is a delicate balance to think through with
Systerserver/In-grid/Autonomic preparing the system beforehand and
having the long-term maintainers of this system involved in its
creation from the start. I've seen several projects being handed off
and more or less overwhelming the new folks trying to pick things up.
For example, getting into system adminstration is not trivial and
things like VPN networks are hard. I realise this is a necessity re:
academic networks but it might be worth considering "less is more" for
the initial phase? To maximise involvement of those will continue this
project. Up to you all.

- Writing documentation is a pretty good way to learn together. Is
there some common platform we can do that on the day? This could even
happen on the servers themselves which is also a way to get familiar
with logging in / using / etc.

Best,
Luke

PS. Sending from my personal mail as I'm actually currently in the
process of leaving Autonomic atm but we've decided that I can run with
this project 🙂 Autonomic will be in touch on another thread about
working together too though!

On Tue, 2023-04-25 at 16:01 +0200, Autonomic Co-op wrote:
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Winnie Soon <w.soon at arts.ac.uk>
> To: Autonomic Co-op <helo at autonomic.zone>, info at systerserver.net
> <info at systerserver.net>, Batool Desouky <batooldesouky at riseup.net>,
> HM
> Ryan <hmryan.esq at gmail.com>, romainbiros at gmail.com
> <romainbiros at gmail.com>, sunniliao at gmail.com <sunniliao at gmail.com>
> Cc: Christian Ulrik Andersen <cua at cc.au.dk>, geoffcox
> <geoffcox at lsbu.ac.uk>
> Subject: servepub.net - building own infrastructure
> Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2023 10:22:24 +0000
> 
> Dear In-grid, Systerserver and Autonomic,
> 
> First of all, thanks so much for supporting this project. As
> discussed
> briefly, we (Geoff (LSBU), Christian (Aarhus University) and Winnie
> (CCI, UAL) ) would like to organize a workshop gather different
> communities (In-grid:
> https://www.in-grid.io/, Autonomic: https://autonomic.zone/,
> Systerserver: https://systerserver.net/) to learn collectively,
> discuss
> issues, and more importantly to build alliances in working
> alternative
> infrastructures.
> 
> We are able to offer a small fee of £250 for each group for this
> workshop (sorry it's not more but it gets things started). The
> workshop
> would be hybrid as we don't have resources set aside for travel etc,
> but those of us in London would ideally get together in the same
> space.
> 
> Our main aim is to build two Raspberry Pis , where one is to act as
> the
> main server and documentation of code/upgrade/system admin works,
> etc:
> with a web server, media wiki and gitea installed (would be
> physically
> located at CCI primarily and can be remotely access to it). The other
> Pi would be more mobile that include wiki2print (developed by Varia)
> for the upcoming issue of our journal APRJA (but connect to the main
> server).
> 
> So to kick start with this process "we think" the following is what
> we
> need to cover (we are not expert in this area, so your help/input
> would
> be appreciated):
> 
> 1. Flashing and bootstrapping the raspberry Pis (Autonomic)
> 2. web server (Nginx) configuration, SSH access (Autonomic)
> 3. bash script (for upgrade/server maintenance/reuse the code for
> other
> Pi in future) (Autonomic)
> 4. Purchase of domain, settings of DNS, Public IP and network
> configuration, and sub domain for the Pi (Systerserver)
> 5. To deal with university VPN > TInc setup (Systerserver)
> 6. Maybe more... so we need your input  (anything you think we should
> know)
> 
> So we want to organize a workshop where you can help sharing the
> skills/ideas, tentatively:
> 
> - 15 mins: Geoff/Winnie/Christian: intro and context
> - 15 mins: In-grid: intro and as a group
> - 2 hours: presentation by Autonomic + discussion
> - 30 mins: break
> - 2 hours: presentation by Systerserver + discussion
> 
> We'd like to suggest a tentative date for this: Monday 26 June,
> 12.00-
> 17.00 (ONLINE).
> 
> We understand it is not a workshop where we can learn everything in
> just 5 hours because system admin or system configuration is a
> specialized area, but we hope that this is a starting point to get
> things going as a collective effort. Once the servers are set up
> (primarily by in-grid) we would migrate what Varia have been
> developing
> at the next stage (wiki2print).
> 
> @In-grid, we can also make it hybrid and for those in London we can
> gather together either in CCI or LSBU (more to be confirmed).
> 
> Let us know if this is feasible for you all, and if you have any
> things
> to add, please share :)
> 
> best,
> Geoff + Christian + Winnie
> 
> 
> 
> ---
> 
> Dr. Winnie Soon (🌈 they/them)
> 
> Course Leader & Senior Lecturer, MA/MSc Computing and Creative
> Industry
> (Modular)
> 
> UAL Creative Computing Institute (CCI)
> 
> Web: https://www.siusoon.net<https://twitter.com/decolonisator>
> <https://twitter.com/decolonisator>
> 
> Mastodon:
> post.lurk.org/@siusoon<https://siusoon.net/post.lurk.org/@siusoon>
> 
> 
> Recent exhibition/publication:
> 
> 1. Data Relations (until 19 Mar 2023), Australian Centre for
> Contemporary Art: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/data-relations/
> 
> <http://www.arts.ac.uk/cci>2. Soon. W., (2023). Writing an Article as
> if Writing a Piece of Software. Toward a Minor Tech (Peer-reviewed
> newspaper), 12(1). Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox (eds.). link:
> https://darc.au.dk/fileadmin/DARC/newspapers/toward-a-minor-tech-online-sm.pdf
> 
> 3. Soon, W., & Valesco, P. (2023). "(De)constructing Machines as
> Critical Technical Practice". Convergence: The International Journal
> of
> Research into New Media Technologies
> 
> 4. Soon, W. (2023). "Queering Code Manual".Them all, Magazine.
> Retrieved from http://www.them-all-magazine.com/winniesoon
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