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Rustic Retreat

Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.

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Mission-Log

Flight-Control Log

The Apollo-NG website and its underlying/supporting infrastructure was beginning to show some severe issues caused by lacking upstream support for Linux VZ. Additionally, for other reasons, whole IP ranges had to be moved so each Box had an additional interface for the migration period which made HTTP or git communication with github.com impossible. That's why the automated deployment of DSpace failed.

However, http://www.netcup.de/ gratefully decided to stick to their decision to sponsor Apollo-NG's hosted network infrastructure needs and provided a new KVM box with more disk space and memory.

The migration to the new box is complete now, hopefully all name servers got the hint as well. The pads are also back online and should also receive a considerable speedup. In the progression of the update the SPDY (Speedy) protocol was added to collect some metrics about the performance gain and to see how it behaves in a smaller set of the real world.

Hopefully, that will conclude this maintenance/update cycle and free resources to find more sponsors and to continue with ongoing projects

2013-06-14 20:47 · chrono
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Apollo-NG website relaunched

In case you have been here before you might want to hit Shift+F5 and clear your cache to avoid any local caching issues. It was a hard decision to take away available timeslots from other research projects but it was necessary to update the rather quaint and non-committing old design. This project is about the future, about modernization and leaving old, inherited, legacy ballast from many contexts of human activity behind. The UI should reflect that.

Luckily, just in the same timeslot the DokuWiki developer crowd has finished the new Weatherwax release, which fixed a lot of issues and drastically decreased the amount of necessary plugins to get all needed features for this site. So a big thanks to all the people who have participated in DokuWiki is in order.

DokuWiki has proved itself here as a totally versatile platform, mixing together features of content-management-systems, wikis, blogs and enough freedom to intertwine them with a hacked up UI and only very minor changes under the hood. And still, even after testing many other solutions, when weighing the amount of required server resources and easy maintainability vs. features, performance and stability there still wasn't any other system that could even come close to its efficiency and ease of integration.

2013-06-09 11:05 · chrono
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Project Release: PiGI Module

Thanks to Maximilian Batz from http://www.pi3g.com/, who sponsored two Raspberry Pi B models for the cause of Apollo-NG, it was time to see what more could be done with them. This essentially forked two subprojects:

  • Raspberry Pi based autonomous Antenna Tracker (following a MAVLink enabled UAV/Drone)
  • Raspberry Pi based geiger-counter

The Tracker is working but still in alpha state (built as a mockup) and not released yet but after a combined amount of 10 days the pigi was finished, including the prototype boards. Some basic documentation is done, the github repo is online and basic prove-of-concept code is finished. It goes to show how amazingly fast we can dive into new technologies today and come up with a new thing without having any prior knowledge how to build a geiger counter. Sharing knowledge via Internet simply rules :)

→ Read more...

2013-06-09 09:49 · chrono
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DSpace Bootstrapping Hackparty Ended

3 nights and two days of hacking have come to a very successful end. It was a great experience, none of us ever participated in a hackparty/hackathon so we really didn't know how to go about it. On Friday we tried to establish a common ground and basic guidelines where to go and what to do, on Saturday we were all over the place and we mostly refined the way we are going to handle the repos and from Sunday morning we really digged into it. At this point I really want to personally thank all people, who joined together and helped to make the hard bootstrapping of a system like this possible, by sharing their time, knowledge, resources and even food :)

All preliminary mockup code has been replaced by a beautiful model/view approach in backbone/ender.js. That should make further development much more straightforward, cleaner and faster.

A working example of the basic results of this hackparty can be viewed on:

http://dspace.ruebezahl.cc/

The git repos are up and running, more information on the pad for now:

https://apollo.open-resource.org/pad/dspace

2025-05-02 06:26
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DSpace Development Updates

After the last collaborative hacking session on DSpace, the client developed and changed a lot. We've already integrated automated testing, using phantomjs and travis, the primary git repo changed from Apollo to github, in order to facilitate Pull-Requests and combined issue tracking. From now on, please don't push DSpace stuff to the Apollo-NG Repo's but use the github repo's as your origin. Every push to develop branch on github is automatically synced to the Apollo-NG repo and then automagically built and deployed on the demo site. This way, we can always be sure, that when a clone from the backup repo is working, the backup is working as well.

Elf-Pavlik is trying to raise interest with other related groups so that the next dspace-hackathon will involve even more people with different backgrounds and capabilities to contribute. It's gonna be a lot of fun :)

2025-05-02 06:26
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Sharing is caring - not tracking

Operating and providing a website for a project always inherently leads to finding ways, to let more people know about your content. Social media bookmarking is a great way to do just that. But, as every so often, many people compromise comfort for reasonable security, including some javascript $social_media_provider offers to easily integrate it, allowing $social_media_provider to track each visit a user makes on any other website, that includes just the button/badge. Most users aren't even aware of the fact that this is happening in the background.

→ Read more...

2025-05-02 06:26
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Random numbers: The fast and the furious

The expression security = usability-1 can be interpreted in many ways. Either things become far too complicated, so that regular users just don't want to be bothered with them or the amount of energy it takes to complete a security-related task is just insane.

To wipe a 1TB (1024GB) disk with random data or prep a disk for encryption, it takes a little more than 4 days (97 hours) when utilizing /dev/urandom. Who would want to wait 4 days for a supporting task like this to finish? Just considering the energy it takes, to keep the whole system up and running, only to write random data to a disk, clearly demands higher random data bitrates without sacrificing quality. Hardware-RNG's are good alternative but not always available, so you might want to give /dev/frandom a try.

→ Read more...

2025-05-02 06:26
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Ubuntu IPv4-IPv6 Dual-Stack name resolution fix

In case you're up to date and want to offer v4 and v6 services in order to promote v6 you may have run into the issue, that apt-get and git and a lot of other programs on your box won't work properly anymore. The main reason why this is happening, is that many upstream services already resolve AAAA but the services attached are not properly configured. Ubuntu's repos are one of the best examples for that. Apt-get failed on half of their own hostnames because it used v6 by default. The solution is quite simple really:

Add the following to /etc/gai.conf: 

precedence ::ffff:0:0/96  100

This will prefer local v4 resolution and will get us through the nasty phase of having to deal with both v4 and v6.

2013-02-06 13:41 · chrono
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Apollo, we have a problem...

Another Hackathon-Weekend passed by and the DSpace-Client and its backends are really shaping up nicely. A lot of code was refactored during the weekend, taking full advantage of amd, backbone and ender now. The first real-time data sharing overlay was tested successfully as well, so we managed to get a lot of the basic features we imagine to have in DSpace working.

Due to the demo build deploy, the nodejs installation was updated to 0.8.17 but the etherpad-lite, which serves the Apollo-NG pads was too old for the switch. Etherpad-Lite was updated to latest, but the db-data of the old pads wasn't compatible to migrate from old format sqlite3 to new MySQL storage. All pads that weren't obviously marked as abandoned have been restored (content only - no history).

More people and groups like the MuCCC and RBOSE seem to have been using the Apollo-NG pads than expected 2 years ago. After 24 hours of downtime of the pads everything is up and running again, offering new features, like import/export functions and the ability to save revision points in the timeline. Since the data changed from sqlite to MySQL there should also be a small gain in performance and long-time reliability. Sorry for the inconvenience, hopefully, the new pads will run as stable for the next 2 years, as the other one did before.

If you are missing a pad or data from it, just drop a note. The data of the old pad will be stored for the next 14 days, afterwards it will be purged.

2013-02-04 12:20 · chrono
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DSpace Progress

A lot is happening and a a few more people have started to contribute their time, skills and knowledge to push DSpace into the realm of reality.

Last Saturday, Niklas Cathor, also a strong supporter of federated technology, dropped by and joined the hackparty to just start hacking on moving us to amd.

Alice and elf-pavlik have continued working on DSpace, fixing a lot of issues and we moved the client to something almost usable. The UI will receive another major overhaul, targeting mobile usage on smaller screens with intuitive touch gestures instead.

It was great to be sitting in a bus and see the Tikiman (our current development mascot, representing the users location) move on the map. It will be even greater when we can share our positions and movements :)

Today a new tileset for Munich was put into production, which hopefully will make rendering on low end devices and small bandwidth connections even faster. The new map reduces the amount of data transfered to the client by over 60%. As always, you can see the development progress live on the demo-site:

http://dspace-develop.open-resource.org/

2013-01-30 14:13 · chrono
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