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The Cloud is Just my old Computer

Welcome to the landing page of the first iteration of the workshop The Cloud is Just my old Computer which takes part on October 13 and 14, 2023, in Amsterdam as part of the Fiber Labs programme! It’s the first of three in the workshop series Practicing Permacomputing, produced by Fiber and organized by members of the Permacomputing community, advocating for the devlopment of radically-slightly-more sustainable approaches to computing.

On this website we, the hosts and participants, gather all relevant links and documentation we accumulated during the time of the workshop, with the goal of making the workshop script available to others that might interested of running similar workshops in the future.

This website is hosted on an old iMac5,2 running debian, from within the Fiber offices. It’s generated from an Etherpad that the participants can edit collectively, using Pandoc.

Workshop Description

You may have heard already the expression “The cloud is just someone else’s computer”. While being a rough simplification of how Internet works, this saying points at the fact that behind the cloud lies an infrastructure of computers configured and programmed to provide various services that are taken for granted, from instant messaging, office and productivity tools, to streaming services. Today these services are provided by large companies often referred to as Big Tech. These companies are linked to problematic practices in which convenience has been traded for a monocultural extractivist, productivist, surveillance infrastructure. In recent years many groups of people have been active trying to figure out if there can be any alternative to this situation. One approach in particular is called self-hosting. Self-hosting is a practice in which a person or group of people decide to make use of the Internet connection of their house or office to install and configure consumer computers to host websites and various network services. It’s often surprising how little equipment you need to do these things, and it’s possible that you already have everything already to get started! For instance, you have an old laptop or an old desktop computer? Let’s see what we can do with it, and if we can turn your old machine into a cloud.

This workshop is open to participants with little or no experience in system administration. You will be introduced to the wonders and frustrations of setting up your own server, making use of your own old laptop, nettop, desktop machine that you thought had turned into ewaste. Over the course of the two days you will learn to turn your antique hardware into a functional server that can provide some network services. At the end of the workshop you will have familiarised yourself with basic computer networking, servers, command line, web hosting, and server installation. You will have created a functional server, which we will host at the fiber premises until the end of the workshop series. Overall you will have acquire enough knowledge and jargon to further explore this alternative to Big Tech cloud, from your own home or studio afterwards, on your own, or better with others, and we will point you in a direction of how to continue when you take your newly created server home.

Participants

Name Online Presence Workshop Pad
Name McNamy www.website.com pad.myold.computer/workshop_name
hellekin @how@ps.s10y.eu Alpine on Raspi3
Olivier github/oliviervd olivier
natacha https://ps.lesoiseaux.io nat
Anja H&D’s site Anja’s pad
Mauricio https://theoctopuslab.com/ n2048
Samuel samuelnarvaez.com, insta Samu pad
Yuta www.yutaikeya.com Yuta’s pad
Fiona – Fiona’s Pad
Ola https://www.olabonati.com olab
Jarl https://www.fiber-space.nl permajar
Allegra & Eleni https://www.fiber-space.nl justin_case
Marty https://martyjek.github.io/DC-Research-MJ/ (@jekentaite.mar) FiberMarty
Cyrus – cy
Nazira https://www.nazkozhanova.xyz nazpad

Workshop Hosts

Name Online Presence Workshop Pad
ugrnm https://post.lurk.org/ugrnm https://pad.myoldcomputer/p/ultrageranium
Lukas lukasengelhardt.net https://pad.myold.computer/p/lukaslogs

Workshop Script

Day 1

0 Intro (1h)

  1. Introduction round: whoami
  2. Workshop hosts introduce themselves
  3. What is Permacomputing (brief!)
  4. Overview of program for the next two days
  5. Introduction of the server that will be used to facilitate this workshop
  6. Small intro to logging and documentaion
  7. Everyone creates their personal pad on the server

CLI/TUI (2h)

  1. Historical contextualisation of the terminal/shell
  2. Try it yourself

Lunch (1h)

Afternoon: Linux installs (2.5h)

  1. theory
  2. praxis
  3. Optional: writing a small shell script to visualize CPU usage, for example through sound

3 Publishing Wrapup (.5h)

  1. We use our collective notes to edit the content of this outline

Day 2

Hosting 101 (3h)

  1. Small SFTP file sharing Excercise
  2. Setting up a web server
  3. How to make your things available outside of the local network?
  4. Port forwarding

Lunch (1h)

  1. We go outside and access our newly published websites from our phones

Other Services (2.5h)

  1. Introduction of low tech alternatives that could replace cloud services
  2. Discussion: are there other things that participants would like to try to set up?
  3. Form groups that try to set up different services together

Publishing Wrapup (.5h)

  1. Collectively add to this page
  2. Encourage people to write small guides for setting up the services they set up, based on their notes
  3. Invite participants to contribute to the wiki and help make this landing page into a script that others can use to organize self-hosting workshops

Drinks (🤷‍♂️h)

Sample HTML page

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <title>Hello World</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Welcome to my Website</h1>
        <p>This is where I permanently compute</p>
        <img src="">
    </body>
</html>

Cool Guides and other useful resources