Long time no report from us, but hey, this is Greece; everything takes
more time.

Some of you may still remember that we invited Squat Net to happen in
our humble place this year. I hope it may become reality. Anyway, we
keep beavering out and making our community more visible to the world
(https://network23.org/prosfygika-community in the making).

Meanwhile, mostly thanks to unstoppable Naomi R and some generous
donations, we reached the first milestone assumed for Prosfygika
Neighborhood Network:

1. All users that were previously connected through crumbling and
fragmented cable infrastructure, are now connected via uniform system of
staircase-installed access points. They pay a modest (5 Euro per flat
per month) fee, that is 100% spent on the development of the network and
other infrastructure.

2. All network is integrated into one address space, under single master
router managing internal traffic.

3. External traffic goes through master router load balancing module and
two uplinks provided by local service provider. ISP no more has ablity
to monitor internal traffic.

4, We are now ready to set up our first internal services, to go beyond
the idea of "just accessing internet".

The next milestone I hope to discuss soon in the community, but possibly
it will include more uplinks, extended set of services and shifting
towards mesh topology.

Now, after achieving a little bit, we need your help to achieve more.

1. We have a guest room here in the infrastructure section, ready to
host tech people coming to help. If anybody fancies having a "working
holidays" in Athens, as a resident hacker of a very peculiar anarchist
squatting community, there is an opening. We offer a decent level of
cultural shock, guest room (with an option of separate flat for
longer-term guests) and a whole bunch of problems to solve.
Food is available, but one has to be able to chip in a bit, or run
separate kitchen. Largely, we live in a kind of urban network, staying
as much out of the system as it is possible.

2. Now, when we have our users reconnected, it is time to set up our
first service, which is going to be a public message system. The role
model is Pirate Box, but we need it to be customised and rebranded, so
it would become Prosfygika Public Announcement system. We have TP-Link
MR-3020 for this purpose, with some external storage. If we can find
anybody keen and able to help us setting it up, it would move the whole
network onto different level. So, please give me a shout.

3. A while ago, some of you folks contacted me, offering help in various
forms. I am still in process of recovering my mail archives after the
disk crash (cheap USB pockets kill SSDs!) so if you are still there,
contact me again, please. We now need a lot of hardware for servers and
desktops, both in the infrastructure department and for our users.
Anything that can decently run some linux or Cyanogen will be used
wisely. Detailed wishlist available upon request and soon online.
***Featured*** need is a decent teleconference camera (we are setting up
a teleconference/webinar station). 75 Euro is the cost of the one I
found here, but it makes solid dent in our resources so perhaps some of
you has a better solution?

Hope to hear from some of you soon. Stay tuned to our website, as it is
going to be the official communication channel now.

Best,
Petros, Prosfygika, Athens, Greece



--
Freelab Researching freedom since 2012 <https://freelab.libtech.website>