Diasp.in - a pod hosted in India

@arkarjun , @shirish now two people are in the team, rope in more people, @rajudvindane, sana, akshat would also be interested I think.

How much of the bandwidth, storage space, processor speed, etc are actually used ?

I am ready to some administration with this

Hi all,
same here. Don't see any issues to spend some time about this as well
for doing any administrative tasks.

@neelgupta I would suggest atleast a 4GB RAM, 4 cores around 2Ghz, around 100GB storage and around 500GB Bandwidth to start with. With VPS's you will be able to upgrade at anytime and KVM is preffered for virtualization.

Those of us in Pune will be meeting up tomorrow night at Bhosari (Pimpri). Get in touch with me or @shirish if you want to join us. @jemshidkk is hosting us. Those who can't join there can come to #piratesin on irc.pirateirc.net. @neelgupta can you register this channel? Also can you add this info to our website? How about 10 pm?

@praveenarimbrathod As given on pirateirc.net The official channel for PPI is #piratepin

I am searching for Different VPS solutions in India. Should I consider the Configuration given my @manukrishnantv Final? Or should we decide on something new.

@rajudvindane PPI is in hibernate mode, Indian Pirates are a different effort, so we need to create a new channel.

And spec given by @manukrishnantv is what we have on poddery.com and it is decent.

@rajudvindane Check
http://eternal-entropy.ws/vps-hosting.php
I will give you a minimum rebate of 500 Rs annually for Domains and/or Hosting in India.
Unlike in the Netherlands, I can't guarantee Privacy.
(ResellerClub account)

@praveenarimbrathod I think you mistook me for someone else. I don't have admin access to the website. Nor do I know a lot about IRC.

I am making a spreadsheet on the different hosting providers with there quotes. @neelgupta @praveenarimbrathod or any body else can reccomend and I will add it to the document. This will help us compare and decide.

@neelgupta The Url you gave is not working

@neelgupta I asked you because you wanted to join the web team. IRC is nothing but plain old group chat. Just search on the net and you'll find out.

3.20 GHz CPU,
2,560 MB RAM,
102,400MB HDD (RAID 1)
512,000 MB Bandwidth,
1 IP

Upto Rs 4000/mo (48,000/yr)
Special: Rs 3600/mo, (Rs. 43,200/yr, -2000 Rebate = Rs 41,200/yr, -4800 1st year rebate = 36,400 for 1st yr)

I know we'll be having a bit less privacy and free speech is flaky. But we wouldn't be depending on foriegn companies or be at their mercy for our basic communications. It is a step in the right direction to digital self sufficiency. Though we'll have a lot of distance to reach there.

@neelgupta Which provider are you quoting?

http://eternal-entropy.ws/vps-hosting.php
My ResellerClub account
(http://india.resellerclub.com)

Check this out

you wanted a "Windows" VPS ?
WHY ?

"Quad Core Processor": Ask how much CPU speed (GHz) will your VPS get.

@neelgupta I asked him for Linux VPS but he mistakenly sent me this one. There will be slightly less price for linux then.

@neelgupta I got another proposal from Go4hosting.com Is any one having other proposals that we can consider?

We will be soon be hosting the Diasp.in pod. We should start on its content. Lets start with building the FAQ section. Bring on any questions that we can include in the FAQ section. Contribute the questions and answers here
http://piratepad.net/u3UxCCLeX0

We can then go on refining the Questions and answers from there.

Hop on to irc.pirateirc.net on #piratesin for real time discussion

“Quad Core Processor”:
So how much CPU speed (GHz) does your VPS get ?

@neelgupta No mention of it from them. I think It will be sufficient enough though

I'd like to suggest two more providers; Prometeus(http://www.prometeus.net) and LeapSwitch(http://leapswitch.com/pune-india/unmanaged-vps-hosting/linux.php)

Both of them provides VPS's out of Pune, Maharashtra. Will prefer KVM/XEN VPS. Their default plans doesn't match our requirement. Try contacting them and even ask for a discount quoting the purpose. If it doesn't work out, let me know.

@neelgupta @rajudvindane any update?

@manukrishnantv , @rajudvindane http://www.hostinger.in/vps-hosting seems affordable and they have 40% off now.

I am not sure whether the server is in India. That much bandwidth for the cost is not affordable. Someone please confirm.

@manukrishnantv those servers are in the US.

Sponsorship request mail sent to CtrlS. yet to receive a reply.

Hello,

I am Anish, representing Diaspora Community. I would like to enquire a sponsorship opportunity. Let we introduce ourselves.

About Diaspora

Diaspora is a free and open source, privacy aware distributed social networking platform. Its built in such a way that each node can be hosted by anybody and will be federated into a large network, without central control.

Our mission is to set up more nodes (pods), so that we can build an alternative system that can protect our privacy. Its done as a public service without any advertising and runs entirely from donations.

Previous Works

We are already running a diaspora server (poddery.com) with the money we collected via donations. Its one among 100s of servers listed in http://podupti.me/. You can learn more about campaign at http://savepoddery.com/.

On this, Knightswarm, a provider from Netherlands has sponsored part of our costs and made possible to run the server seamlessly for 3 years.
https://poddery.com/#supporters

News report on Hindu : http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/ushering-in-the-future-of-internet-distributed-social-networks/article2133355.ece

What we want

There is no diaspora server in India till now. We are planning to start another public diaspora service at India. So, we are looking for sponsorship from CtrlS, which is largest provider for cloud services in India. We are looking for CtrlS to bear whole or part of the hosting expenses by providing a Virtual Private Server at CtrlS. We need the following specs, which is located at India.

Dual/Quad Core processor
8 GB RAM
80 GB HDD
500 GB Monthly Bandwidth

What you get

1. Featuring of Ctrls in home page as sponsor, like (https://poddery.com/#supporters)
2. Mentioning your name in every press release we publish.
3. Offline & online promotions bearing your company's name.

Expecting a positive reply soon.

We have some hosting here at the hamara linux project - we're quite up for helping run a diaspora pod. Shall we go ahead and spin one up? I am not sure we can give you 500GB a month of bandwidth as it's pretty expensive at the datacentre - but maybe we can jointly crowdfund towards bandwidth?

@vik yes that would be great! @manukrishnantv has diasp.in domain, he can set it to your server once it is ready. Estimate the cost for 3 years and we can start crowd funding straight away.

@vik I have made a diaspora installer package for debian https://wiki.debian.org/Diaspora it can save you some pod setup time. Is Hamara based on Debian or Ubuntu?

great - I was just looking at the diaspora install guide - but if it's ok with you, we can pull your package into our repo. Hamara is currently based on Ubuntu - but the ubuntu guys are not that keen without us signing their licence agreement - so we will probably end up shifting to debian in future releases

@manukrishnantv do you have an ssl certificate for the domain?

I just checked bandwidth costs at the datacentre - for 500GB they charge RS5618 per month excluding taxes. We've asked them if they discount this for a fixed term contract.

In the meantime, we will pull your package http://bugs.hamaralinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53

And spin up the host

@vik Not yet. We can use StartSSL. Myself or @praveenarimbrathod will generate one and share it with you.

500GB Bandwidth was just an estimate. We were running vnstat on poddery server and the maximum it recorded till now is 75GB per month, last December with all the backups and website move going on. So, I'll say 100GB will be a safe value for a starting pod.

@vik The average monthly usage with poddery is less than 50GB. Also, some datacenters provide free incoming bandwidth. If that's available, it can cover almost half the bandwidth, as for the pod, incoming and outgoing bandwidth are almost equal.

@vik it would great if you base on debian (I'm definitely biased here as I'm a Debian Developer). Feel free to pull in and let me know if it can be improved in any way. The more testing and adoption, the better.

I know, I am sort of regretting not doing that in the first place now! We're too close to final release - so will likely make the change for our next release. I'll get the package into our repo tonight.

Had a talk with @vik on IRC. They are running openstack. So, disk encryption is not an issue. I think even 50GB bandwidth will be good enough to start with.

Few shared cores on a decent processor, 4 to 8GB RAM, around 50 to 80GB disk and 1 IPv4 will be fine enough. Let @vik and his team decide the final spec based on the available resources.

I can point either DNS or A records for the domain. Just provide me with the values.

Just an update - we're creating the instance today and installing diaspora with Praveen's package. Will let everyone know here once it's live.

@vik lets know the ip address so we can point diasp.in there.

@praveenarimbrathod Forwarded the mail which Kumar Shantanu has sent me. I am a bit busy. Hope you can coordinate the setup of the pod.

@manukrishnantv @praveenarimbrathod let us know if you want us to take care of the set up for you. One of the hamara team can probably handle it tomorrow?

@manukrishnantv thanks, I will point the DNS records. @vik having more people experienced in pod management is always better. So if you can setup the pod, that would be great. Let me know if you need any help.

@praveenarimbrathod I haven't set one up before - so if you can point me to a howto that would be great

@vik if you have imported diaspora-installer package, its as easy as sudo apt-get install diaspora-installer.

diasp.in is coming soon! https://poddery.com/posts/1545143

@praveenarimbrathod facing a few configuration issues here, drop back into our irc if you can?

Up and running now, just requires the diaspora config. That's diaspora (care of diaspora-installer) on hamara linux running on our openstack in Noida :)

@vik superb! So happy to see a diaspora pod in India.

@vik did you create your account yet? https://diasp.in/u/piratesin is possibly the first diaspora account hosted in India.

@vik we should design a good front page and make a good press release. Indian Pirates and Hamara Linux announces first diaspora pod hosted in India. And then what is diaspora, why is it important blah blah. Any volunteers to write a press release?

@praveenarimbrathod if someone can produce the text, I'll get graphic designs sorted tomorrow

Great work guys . Nice to see a pod using package management for the first time :)

@praveenarimbrathod I have a colleague who can write the press release. He should be joining this thread shortly. Do you want to give some bullet points aside to your comment above?

@vik some ideas at the top of my mind. @akshay , @pavi, @balasankarchelamat , @shyambalakrishnan see if I missed anything.

• some points from why privacy is important - see yatra.diasporafoundation.org
• How we are dependent on foreign companies, mostly based in US (technology and infrastructure) for our day to day communications
• We have no control over their policies or laws that shape them. Their sole aim is to make money from the data we share.
• Its a fact many countries (especially in Europe) have better laws for privacy and free speech, but how long can we depend on those countries?
• We are wining the struggle of controlling our infrastructure and technology for our day to day communications via diaspora (we need to take control of more services like jabber and text secure/kontalk where free software already exist). But out struggle to better our laws and provide privacy and free speech has to continue. It is even more urgent today.
• We urge more organizations and communities to start managing their communication infrastructure.
• State a few lines about diaspora yatra
• About Indian Pirates and Hamara Linux
• We could use https://diasp.in/posts/191 or other designs your team can come up with.

Hi All - I'm Vik's colleague: he's asked me to join this group to help with putting a press release together.
Please do add more contributions.
The list by @praveenarimbrathod : this gives great content on the 'why' we are doing this.
A Press Release will need to cover the 'who' 'what' 'when' and 'where' too as well. Can anyone contribute content against those? Bullet points is best.

@adambp hi,

who: Indian Pirates and Hamara Linux
what: A public diaspora service, for people to sign up freely and participate in decentralized diaspora social network (users can choose any diaspora service provider to participate and this is first such a provider hosted in India). A list of public diaspora providers can be see at podupti.me
when: yesterday the site went live
where: It is hosted in Noida, on rack running OpenStack
@vik can provide the technical specifications

anyone installing hamara linux can setup such a pod with one command or choose from the package management software (like google play store or apple app store).

Hamara Linux is first distribution to provide a diaspora-installer package in its stable release.

apt-get install diaspora-installer

More points to consider:

who:
* privacy advocates?
* technology savvy?
* engineers?
* tech literates?
like toothpaste ads that show doctors, we should show that the backers know what they are doing.

When:
* Diaspora itself started a long time back.
* Indians have been running other pods since a long time. But not hosted in India?
* Maybe a pitch about how diaspora yatra lead to or is related to diasp.in

Unrelated comment: If we highlight the Indian-ness of it enough, thousands of Indians will join within days (and leave within hours after joining, that's another matter)

Here we go. Some designs for the landing page and sign up page. The designer has taken content from the current landing page - so I appreciate we will need to change that. Suggestions?

@vik looks great. Just add Indian Pirates logo too.

yeah - sorry that the logo has been missed, I'll get the footer reworked.

I guess we should remove "configure your pod?"

Would also make sense once the design is finalised, to get translations into the main indian languages.

@vik the design looks great. You can also change the make a contribution section, may be something like contribute to handle our bandwidth expenses or anything else.

@manukrishnantv cool, yes let's link that section to a contribution page. I guess those contributions should come to the Indian Pirates?

@praveenarimbrathod the email address provided by diaspora seems not to be workin
###
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

shantanu@diaspora.in
Unrouteable address

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

Return-path: shantanu@hamaralinux.org
####
Is it expected ?

Hi All. Here's my first draft for your PR - quoting heavily from @praveenarimbrathod and with great lines from @akshay . Can you both and @vik @pavi, @balasankarchelamat , & @shyambalakrishnan look it over and let me know if you want tweaks and changes.
Left to add is 'boilerplate' information about the two org.s. Can I have a bit from you guys on Indian Pirates? Then we only need contact information - Twitter is fairly standard for general release info these days...
Let me know?

@adambp Cannot think of anything to add, @praveenarimbrathod might want to add a paragraph about the diaspora yatra?

@adambp I have a contact and the Times of India who could probably get the release out. Will make a call.

@adambp looks good. A small spelling correction - "manages out day to day communications." should be "manages our day to day communications."

Also I would prefer to use the term "Free Software" or "Mukt Software" instead of Open Source and "GNU/Linux" operating system instead of just "LINUX".

Diaspora Yatra website http://yatra.diasporafoundation.org needs to be mentioned in addition to pirates.org.in

Diaspora Yatra is campaign across India, reaching out to young people in schools and colleges, journalists, and common people, who use internet everyday for their day to day communications, conveying freedom, privacy and self reliance in technology and infrastructure is possible and educate them about these options.

http://www.pirates.org.in/constitution/index.html#/10 has the goals of Indian Pirates.

About Indian Pirates:

Indian Pirates wants the ideas of peer-to-peer, direct democratic organization to spread in our society.
We would like to engage with more young and educated citizens and bring positive change with their involvement.

We stand for human rights and civil liberties. Our origins are in campaigns for sharing of knowledge and fight against copyright and patent monopolies that locks down knowledge.

@kumar-shantanu, two things, 1. domain is diasp.in, 2. it is not an email address, though we could make it an email address also if we want to.

@praveenarimbrathod edits made and draft boilerplate added wdyt?

"We have no control overs their policies" should be "over" right?

Good catch @akshay

@adambp "First Indian Decentralized Social Network launches" is a bit confusing. I think changing it to "First Indian node of Decentralized Diaspora Social Network launches" makes it clear. And the title of the file has a typo. "Hamama" -> "Hamara". Otherwise it looks good to go.

@praveenarimbrathod should we get the landing page in place before releasing?

@vik yes, that would be nicer.

@praveenarimbrathod updated design with new footer. Our design team have asked if they can tweak the pirate logo - I have told them to send their suggestions. Will post them here and see what you think.

@vik yes, let them tweak it. Change the name to Indian Pirates, we never got to update the name (Pirate Movement of India was renamed to Indian Pirates). You'll find source svg in web team sub group.

@praveenarimbrathod OK, rather than a tweak, we seem to have a complete reboot of the Indian Pirates logo. What do you think? I really like the first one!

here's another version of the landing page also showing how a v2 logo might look

@akshay @manukrishnantv @praveenarimbrathod could we get some views on the logo change so that we can build the diasp.in landing page?

@vik The design looks great. I am still not officially part of Indian Pirates. Let the initial members decide on the logo change.

Btw, what are the plans for "Configure the Pod" and "Donate" sections?

@manukrishnantv Donate is going to be set up for donations towards hosting / bandwidth etc. Am looking for suggestions for the configure area

@vik I became a member only last week. Yet, I'll just tell whatever comes to my mind.

In old and new logo, the pirates of caribbean theme is shining (sail and patch). I don't really know if pirates were good people. Although in the old logo it could be looked on as a flag too.

About the new logo 1 & 2, the use of braces is giving a sense of relation with coding and software which's cool.

logo 3, I don't think it'd make easy sense when it is shown alone to a new user. (without the other logos).

logo 2, has resemblance to the GNU logo which is cool. Their might be a better font face for the name. It is shaped down like a triangle, which's cool. There's an I and a P hidden inside.

logo 1, the brace that forms the jaw actually looks like a weird expression for a smiley. :-} The headgear looks like a cyclist's helmet.

I am no designer and so the suggestions may be extremely silly. With that said, I loved the original Pirate Movement of India logo more than the above three. Logo 1 and 2 was too difficult to understand for me and logo 3 give a wrong impression about the cause IMO. Actually, it seems they all tried to recreate the "deadly and we-loot-everything" image of pirates - something we are actually trying to change...

Well, this is strictly my personal opinion and I am happy to go with any logo that the community chooses. :)

@balasankarchelamat @akshay thanks for the feedback. I agree with Balasankar somewhat - i think the logos are cool - but maybe too much "Pirate". Let me speak to our designer again and see if we can come up with something more inclusive!

@vik I was going through some old threads and saw this: https://codema.in/d/gaCveMmJ/need-volunteers It has a history of how the current logo was formed. Appears like pirate movements all over the world have a similar logo. I don't think that is a rule though. Maybe they all were lousy in designing something new.

I think similar logo is to increase universal visibility and understandability.. Pirate party logo, thus, could be one big identity mark all over the world and it surely has its own advantages..
With that said, there is nothing bad in being different than others..

PS: Don't hit me for these diplomatic comments.. :D

I spoke to the designer yesterday and we both came to a similar conclusion - to keep with the international pirate movement and to craft a logo similar to others. Let's see what he comes back with. Will post here for views.

In light of http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/25/wikileaks-google-staff-emails-us-government shall we also host an email service yourname@disap.in?

diasp.in is down, am checking why. I guess we better create an admins mailing list or such like. Suggestions?

@vik did you find out why diasp.in is down?

Start a 'diasp.in maintainers' sub group here. We can have a mailing list with private archives as contact address for the pod. We used autistici.org for plodder.com podmin list. We can get one there or if you host lists on hamaralinux, we can use that too. If we can get the diasp.in press release on diaspora yatra lauch on 28th, it will get noticed more. It is also international privacy day.

Since diaspora address is public, it can attract spammers. But we can consider hosting emails on another domain.

@praveenarimbrathod Yes - there is a bug in the iscsi implementation for open stack. We're fighting with that at the moment :(
@kumarshantanu is working on it, might be a late night, but will be back online as soon as possible.

Yes, the problem seems to be related to iscsi server where it's not able to keep the session information of LUN persistence after server reboot. I am still trying to find a solution, will keep you guys posted.

Hello, diaspora pod is back online. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Back to the logo discussion - here are some more ideas that are a little closer to the expected theme

@vik I like the second one. Share the source format once we finalize a logo.

@praveenarimbrathod I like that one too

Ah. I was just gonna ask why it was closed. :D

@balasankarchelamat Yeah, sorry for the noise, I'm new to this process :)

Hi all,
Saw it, liked both 2 and 3. 3 is better in the sense it evokes the whole yin-yang thing as well so it might work well male,female equality as well (for a brand.)

@vik That's ok.. Everyone had a first time.. :)

@praveenarimbrathod @vik -- Following the openstack/iscsi bug we faced and diaspora pod being off-line for some time, we are planning to do some maintenance work on our cloud infrastructure. To avoid any downtime we are moving the machines to another data-center(Gurgaon). Can some one from diaspora team help us with providing a document on how to move diaspora data to a new installation. Alternatively we can provide a fresh machine to diaspora team and they can do it themselves. Please suggest.

@kumarshantanu can we just clone the vm? Then we just need to adjust network settings and DNS records.

@praveenarimbrathod - We will be moving the machines to kvm infrastructure and there is no straight forward way to clone vms from openstack to kvm.

@kumarshantanu what are the supported disk formats of openstack?

If this is not possible, install diaspora on the new machine, copy /usr/share/diaspora/public and SSL certificates to new host, dump the database and import it on the new machine.

@praveenarimbrathod okay, it will involve a downtime of 30 to 60 mins. Would you like to suggest a timing ?

@kumarshantanu uploaded files needs to be copied as well. @manukrishnantv which directory has the uploaded files?

Choose a time that works for you.

@vik we have to configure connection to Facebook and other social networks. Also officially launching this during hamara conference would be nice. Another good thing would be to enable pod statistics.

@vik @kumarshantanu diasp.in seems down, can you folks check? There is also some pending tasks remaining which we discussed earlier.

@praveenarimbrathod There was a problem with the ip routing in datacenter. It's working fine now. I will check with the datacenter guys if why this happened.

@praveenarimbrathod Sorry for the silence - been pretty busy with the hamara linux conference and releases. I discuss diasp.in at the conference and encourage people to sign up. Meanwhile, the landing page has been produced but needs text. Have hosted it here while we discuss:
http://www.viktara.org.uk/diasp/

@vik my text suggestions, @anupam , @akshay refine and expand.

• We need to translate this page in all Indian languages.

Welcome friend,

diasp.in,
- liberates you from corporate control, we don't sell your data
- run by people who stand up for privacy as a human right
- runs Free Software, independently verified by community
- you can choose from hundreds of service providers and still be in touch with your friends on diasp.in (federated)
- hosted at Noida, India, makes India self sufficient in communication technology. Not depending on any foreign company for technology or infrastructure.

Other parts can be removed and we can just add one line,

• Learn more about diaspora at diasporafoundation.org

I have created a sub group for diasp.in maintenance https://codema.in/g/PkzpyLvW/indian-pirates-diasp-in-maintainers we can continue the discussions there.

we can continue homepage discussion her and I have started other discussions in the new group.

@vik can you add the files to our git repo at https://gitlab.com/groups/piratemovin? Share your gitlab id, so we can give you access. @akshay I think we can rename it to piratesin.

@vik we can point MX record of pirates.org.in here and provide email to all members. That way we can host our own emails and not get spammed. What do you think?

@praveenarimbrathod is renaming necessary? It might break everything. I don't think gitlab automatically redirects renamed repositories?

@akshay it makes things consistent. We will have to change the urls ourselves, these are accessed by only a few of us anyway. But its fine if we want to just keep it as is.

@praveenarimbrathod Yeah - would make sense to have mail on that server - I think we discussed the possibility before.

@akshay can you take the source from http://www.viktara.org.uk/diasp/ and update diasp.in?

@akshay @praveenarimbrathod you should be able to wget it - otherwise I can put it on the server. Let me know if you need me to do anything?

I'm working on this. I don't know if sign in can be integrated. Will replace that with buttons to log in and sign up.
ETA: 3 days.

Checkout diasp.in. The code is at gitlab

@akshay thanks! Can you add the text suggestions we discussed earlier and also link to netneutraluty.in?

@akshay Looks good. Could you link logo's to our respective websites?

The new home page looks great. Refreshing.

@akshay can we add the bullet points discussed in this thread on front page?

@anupam , @vik can you review the press release we prepared for adding jabber service to diasp.in and poddery https://etherpad.mozilla.org/JabberPodderyDiaspIN