Alternative Data Centres

SCCP (Seatle Community Co-Location Project)

http://seaccp.org/

Short history: CCCP (California Community Colocation Project) started by pro-capitalist libertarians. Grew fast, had at one point 10 cabinets. Their friends wanted to start one in Seattle. CCCP shrunk later because they didn't have the workforce and they had an all voluntary donation model.

When riseup proposed a cooperative model in Seattle, there was a lot of conflict with the folks from california that thought it must be voluntary.

Other community colocation projects have tried to get started in north america, in NYC, toronto, chicago. There are also radical groups with 1/2 cabinet in vancouver.

SCCP now has 30 servers and two cabinets. Mix of radical/non-radical projects. Finances covered by riseup.net since the SCCP is not a legal entity. 1800$USD/mth switched to 1200$/mth. Should be out of the red by the end of the year. 600$/cab, 20$/mbps. 10mbps for free and $20/mbps for extra. 20Amps per cabinet plus 10$/Amp extra. power is the most limiting factor.

The future is more cabinets, maybe a free an antenna so posibility of connecting to Seatle Wifi. Would bring possibility of very fast and free offsite backups.

Half of riseup's budget is colo, other half is hardware or stipends to people and plane tickets so that elijah can visit the tanneries. Seperate checking accounts for SCCP and other projects, donations coming in thru paypal and by check.

Typically 8mbps of traffic. We hope to do more. Streaming means that people will start using the new cheap bandwidth. With the addition of SCCP and Jebba there is more bandwidth for major events.

Problems have been getting remote management working, like getting terminal servers working, help appreciated.

no tracking system for the sccp, the job is just rotated

no legal problems since the sccp was instituted.

photos from the westin:

gitoyen

Created in 2001 by five organisations. So founders were: FDN, Globenet, Gandi, Netaktiv, Placenet. No services by itself, it`s just a structure for network and physical location for its members. It is now:-

nadir.org

Established before 95 (background with CCC chaos computer club and anti-fa), when lots of groups didn't know what was going on with "the web". In 97 when there was a wave interest in the internet this had the effect of nadir becoming an internet service provider, there was a decison to rather break the gap between tech and political. So since have been a broad group involved in direct involvement with the movement.

Side discussion - background of people running autonomous servers

The poltical theme, and the working with groups from different - sometimes opposed - backgrounds has come up with other groups (nodo50 mentioned this explicitly). asking for intros of new groups with the possibility that they could be rejected should make groups aware that their own site is not simple hosted somewhere, but hosted with nadir.

"this is not promoting a particular technology", turning the question round so activists find the tools appropriate for them, not necessarily helpful promoting the latest tools

A theme previously was: Organising political defence of autonomous servers we need to be more accountable to users. So users will help to defend them.

By elijah's experience, most groups here are more activists coming to the technology. Some indymedia people were techies first, but mostly became more and more activists. other people were activist first and now nearly only do technical-acttivist work . elijah sometimes has no more time for doing other campaigns, but he considers everything about the technical work he does to be deeply political in terms of how it is organized and embedded in social movements. The example from MarsNet is that there were activists who knew little technically and got involved with help from globenet and gitoyen.

free.de

(Should not be mistaken for free.fr! - Website in german only)

Started before as an ecological campaign - Science Shop? A movement to bring technology to the people, who could not otherwise afford it, and to make technology responsive to the needs of the people. In Germany, there is not a formal organization, but there are in other countries. [science shop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_shop]

They have a self managed house in Dortmund.

A full ISP including dialup. Supplying dialup, hosting, mail.... as much as they can. Have 2 cabinets, one full next starting to fill. Not colocated inside a legal space which is owned by the people using it (self-managed). No one living there anymore. 2 SDSL uplinks (have their own ASN) - 2 x 3 MBit/s. They found two different providers that would provide BGP over SDSL lines. FreeBSD users (historical reason: started in 1993, Linux not ready as that time). 2 people doing core technical work.

Having physical control of the server means more costly bandwith. More than 400 euros a month of bandwidth. A lot of money goes into power and into controlling temperature, with the added problem that the building is under monument protection, and therefore they cannot install an airco.

Giving on-line space to campaigners, cultural projects...

Current projects: a wifi mesh network, as an autonomous system, is connected to the internet (using cheap consumer flat rates) in multiple places using tunnels. Could be a way that other wifi mesh networks that are autonomous systems could tunnel to one another. Mesh networks are more interesting when they have *real* IPs.

Wifi net at: http://www.durchdieluft.net/ (tr:"throughtheair") Routing info on: http://www.durchdieluft.net/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=8

money is a very serious issue: 1500/mo uplink space current dial-in costs. Some commercial projects, also donations from users which improved when checked who is there. LDAP for mail and ftp admin giving chance to find out who is there and write to them and ask if they can donate. Admins don't get any money out of it. Bank accounts in Germany have no secrecy anymore. So transfers from users must not have any content that relates to any specific mail box or account. Would be better without even the knowledge of admins knowing who donated, but time to develop this, maybe more collectives would be interested in an anonymous payment system?

Because of repression problems, would be interested in moving websites (or jails/vservers) easily. This was mentioned in earlier session by other server collectives as well.

Note made: Conference call was made to system administrators, it makes it sound like autonomous servers were only run by technical admins. Running server has relationship with the user, docs, finance... We need the movement to come along and help us There is too much emphasis on the sys admin task, there is much need for the other roles when running isp. The sys admin and the money is the basis. We would like to do more, documenting and helping, just there is shortage of time. Conclusion agree that both are important.

What next...

proposal: instead of (another) presentation about riseup.net we could do the rescheduled talk from yesterday morning on ssl, certificate authorities etc. It would also fit fine with the ongoing working group on security protocol.

STAMP: MeetingNotes/AlternativeDataCenters (dernière édition le 2008-12-19 18:59:54 par anonyme)