Custom/Turnkey SAFEnetwork farming hardware

@neo exactly my first thoughts on seeing the pics

Having said that. I’d be keen on aversion with different antennae positioning.

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I’ll get photos out as soon as the casing is re-arranged. Current plan is to have 3 for 3x3:3 MIMO: Back/center, left/front right/center (the antennas are on an arm that is usually bent 90 degrees. Here’s part of the reason we’re selling now: Feedback.

If you have thoughts/suggestions, I’m thrilled to have a listen :).

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你好,
我很高兴知道你要我们的路由。哪里你?

你喜欢什么我们的路由吗?

:)

-Jake

This is something that really should be a thing as the SAFE network begins to show signs of maturity. The concept of many, many diffuse nodes is clearly much more resilient than centralized large nodes. Here’s the hardware that I can help to facilitate:

  • Intel-Based Router with Custom Firmware ($500/ea, somewhat less in bulk)
  • Low-spec, low-price, high-quality ARM router (quality: it does what it claims to, and does so well) (less than $100, and these get very attractive in volume)
  • Intel-Based Xeon-class router with custom firmware (~$5000/ea, somewhat less in bulk)
  • Dev boards - every breeed
  • Custom hardware development - Rockchip, allwinner and Intel.

IN the end it’s going to be a lot of projects, working together, to make the web a commons and a safer place. I’d love to help.

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Spotted that Freedomboxen are available for purchase now Be a FreedomBox Pioneer | FreedomBox - Personal Server at Home

Any news on a #Debian package?

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This looks great.

A SAFENetwork version would be Awsome.

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Freedombox will only use software from Debian, but if we package it I’m sure they will install it (I asked a couple of years ago on their mailing list and they were interested.

So the task is to package for Debian, there has been some discussion over the years

Now that is exciting.
Maidsafe apps on the freedom box?

If maidsafe could package for debian I would buy a freedom box for myself and perhaps for people I know.

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I wonder if it would be worth doing a crowdfunder to get a developer to do this? cc @jonas @dirvine

A https://opencollective.com/ might be interesting, a few hundred people donating a few pounds a month could pay developer(s) a bit?

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Packaging for debian is usually not hard for a c/c++ or python program if you have the right libraries/tools. Not sure about a Rust program though…

I think Rust can make things more complicated https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2tnql2/how_rust_applications_and_libraries_fit_into/

I’m no expert. but I see that Cargo is in buster Debian -- Details of package cargo in buster so things may be easier now?

The other stumbling block was I think electron but @Jonas is the man to ask. This was a while ago so things may have progressed.

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Rust platform is progressing well in Debian, and indeed the core tools like cargo is now stable (i.e. is included with the “buster” branch of Debian wich was recently released as stable).
Rust projects are maintained somewhat differently from most other packaging work in Debian, in that the Debian Rust team (i.e. those maintaining both core tools and most libraries) track all packages as a single git - not one git per project as is common in Debian. I am not familiar with this style of maintenance and is frankly concerned about it being sensible, and I have therefore not yet involved myself with maintaining any Rust code.
I strongly urge anyone interested in helping out improving the Rust coverage in Debian to join the Debian Rust team and help out! You do not need to be a formal member of Debian to join.

If Electron some day gets packaged for Debian, I doubt that it will stabilize enought to sensibly be included with a stable Debian release. A comparably big Nodejs challenge being attempted for some time is the Javascript parts of Gitlab, and work looks like it will not become stable.
Again, anyone willing to help (someone optimistic than me, that is) are encouraged to join the Debian Javascript team and help out.

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Thanks for mentioning me - that helps draw my attention to the conversation! :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your insights and advice!

Does not being part of stable have implications for freedombox? Would it just mean it can’t/won’t be part of the standard freedombox distro but could be (relatively) easily added by the end-user?

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If we get Appimage packages of the vault, the browser, etc then it should be easy to use them on any Linux distro

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FreedomBox includes packages not only from Debian main, but also (optionally, I hope, due to the lack of security support) from https://backports.debian.org/ - so for being accessible to FreedomBox a package need not be in Debian stable, only Debian testing (+ someone needs to take the added responsibility of maintaining the slightly forked package for backports as well).

Indeed, someone can maintain packages for https://appimage.org/ or https://flathub.org/ or any other software distribution. Debian is not the only way, it just happens to be a quite stable way with an (in my opinion) strong track record :slight_smile:

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I mentioned this to the guys over at nodl, they might be interested as an optional module which could be installed. Someone said it would not be high on the priosity list but if someone else added it they would be down (if I remember this conversation correcty, it was quite a few months ago)

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@jonas could you estimate the effort to get it packaged initially?

I realize this will be a wildly inaccurate guess, but better than mine, I don’t know if it’s 10, 100 or 1000 hours work, you may be able to do better than that?

Is it work you’d like to do if it was funded?

cc @dirvine

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Sorry, I am unable to guesstimate the initial packaging work needed for this. Also because the amount of initial work varies depending on the amount of care for subsequent maintenance of same set of packages - i.e. it is easier to create a drive-by dump (which I refuse to do myself) than to establish a proper long-term sustainable rhythm.

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