15 Aug
2025
15 Aug
'25
10:30 p.m.
Hi, all. One of Sudo's current volunteer server administrators here.
On Mon, Aug 11, 2025 at 02:31:12AM -0000, Michael Z via sudo-discuss wrote:
I believe Sudoroom's IT infrastructure such as
website, listserv, wiki and sudo humans are hosted on Digital Ocean VPS.
Yes, this is indeed the current state of affairs. We are currently in
the midst of bringing a MemberMatters[0] instance online to replace Sudo
Humans, as Humans is an unmaintained project that is very much showing its
age. We have a small working group that's leading this effort, but more
help from eager Sudo members would certainly be welcome. Please get in
touch if you're interested.
Noise bridge has some collocation spaces in a data
center where they host their website. On premise hosting is not used for several reasons:
1. Both Hackerspaces are using wireless internet from Monkeybrains. Thus bandwidth is
limited. (Should be sufficient if it just scales to serve the community that actually
comes to the hackerspace).
2. Security and reliability: Data center is less likely to have power and network outage.
Although we are do-ocratic, it might be a good idea to have some access control around
critical infrastructures.
I completely agree with the above. I'd also add that separation of
internet-facing hosting from "eyeball networks" is a good idea in this
day and age, as DDoS attacks are a fact of life. The networks of hosting
datacenters are much more able to handle these sorts of events. Digital
Ocean offers DDoS protection services as an included component of all
hosting services they offer.
While I would love to maintain our own physical server infrastructure,
it just doesn't make sense at Sudo's current scale.
Thus to your question, I think the best option is to
use existing VPS or a SaaS provider. Also the closest FOSS alternative to discord should
be Matrix, both are group chats with support for rooms and spaces. Matrix rooms can also
be bridged with discord rooms. I think you are implying that forum is a better medium than
group chats. I agree that group chats are overused especially with the advent of discord.
One thing we can do is to use the wiki for more long-term and static information to
complement group chats.
I don't want to be dismissive of anyone's ideas, however the reality
is that we are very short on IT / server administrator volunteer hours.
If someone is (or ideally multiple someones are) willing to step up and
help both set up and maintain a new service (be it Matrix, Discourse,
IRC, or anything else), that would be fantastic. But I personally don't
have the time to dedicate to such a project. My admin time is currently
being taken up by a large migration project to bring the existing
software stack (Mailman, Mediawiki, Wordpress, etc.) up to more recent
versions.
--Sean
[0]: https://github.com/membermatters/MemberMatters