EcolNet and the escomposLinux.org project LG #86

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...making Linux just a little more fun!

EcolNet and the escomposLinux.org project
By Javier Malonda

The (not so) brief story.

Why should I be interested in this article?

This is an article about the birth, growth and everyday life of an Internet community. Why is this Internet community so special? See it for yourself.

It has its very own network. This translates into an independent community, only dependent on bandwidth providers (our ISPs). Everything else is maintained by its members.
It's quite big, involving people all around a country, Spain in this case. It's interesting to see how people can coordinate, even while live far away from each other.
It's a non profit member-defrayed organization. Each member pays for his own box, his Internet connection, and is responsible for the services he has chosen to offer.
It's a pro-Open Source organization, basically a Linux thing. The group hosts many Open-Source projects, providing the needed infrastructure to its members.
It's open to everyone who has something to offer to help spread the Open Source gospel. The infrastucture is run by just a bunch of volunteers who pay costs out of their pockets, but everyone is invited to contribute in any way: writing code, writing documentation, promoting Open Source in any way, etc...

We're using cable and DSL Internet connections. Most likely this community model could be run on more modest bandwidth connections. Of course it can be run on better connections, thus offering new possibilities. It's all a matter of imagination and motivation. As for the boxes, some of them are pretty old for today's standards, but they deal very well with their everyday duties, showing the true power of Open Source and being a remarkable example of what can be done with Linux and hardware that someone else would consider a piece of junk.

Following EcolNet's example, bigger or smaller communities could be built on the same basis. Keep on reading and see what we have come up with. Maybe it will fire your imagination. I hope it does :)

Some history

escomposLinux stands for a "short" name of the newsgroups hierarchy es.comp.os.Linux. As you can easily note, this is the root of all Linux newsgroups in Spanish and the other languages spoken in Spain. "es" refers to Spain, in contrast with "esp" which hosts all the Spanish speaking groups in general.

The es.comp.os.Linux newsgroup was founded in 1996, promoted by Pablo Saratxaga. In those days, there was no newsgroup to discuss about Linux in Spanish, not even in the esp.* top-level domain noted before. Later, in 1999, and due to the incredible increase of traffic, a split of the original es.comp.os.Linux was proposed, voted and approved, so four more specific groups were created:

es.comp.os.Linux.instalacion: Installation and configuration
es.comp.os.Linux.programacion: Programming in Linux
es.comp.os.Linux.redes: Networking under Linux
es.comp.os.Linux.misc: Stuff that didn't fit in any other place

This current year saw the birth of es.comp.os.Linux.anuncios (announcements) , though it doesn't hold much traffic as of now.

In the year 2000, some active es.comp.os.Linux users created a first version of the escomposLinux web page, hosted at Linux-es.com. Not long after that, a group of five ecol users, bought the escomposLinux.org domain and the web page got moved to its actual location, at www.escomposLinux.org. Those Linux users who were especially active at the newsgroups, received web hosting space and FTP access, so they could have a place to display all their Linux documentation and personal projects. Everyone interested, can access to a @escomposLinux.org mail account. I'd like to note that, in Spain, things were hard even in the year 2000, and having an email account was not as easy as it is nowadays.

These "Five Good Men" started the project writing a manifesto about the guidelines to be followed. All initial the costs were assumed by those volunteers, who never asked for financial help. Step by step, the escomposLinux.org project gets bigger and bigger, as new services are added and more people gets involved. Luckily, DSL become relatively affordable. On October 2001, all the services provided at the time are moved to machines run and maintained by regular es.comp.os.Linux.* users. This is when the escomposLinux.org project becomes EcolNet.

What's EcolNet?

Technically, EcolNet is the escomposLinux.org network, a bunch of computers spread all over the country. EcolNet is run, administered and defrayed by volunteers who have in common their passion for Linux and the regular use of the es.comp.os.Linux.* groups. We are not "37337 gurus". We enjoy learning how Linux works. Plus we are happy to help the Linux community.

What was the motivation behind EcolNet? Basically, the terrible management by the Spanish ISPs of the newsgroups, including es.comp.os.Linux.*. Slow services, lost messages... We thought we could do better. Also, the first place that hosted escomposLinux.org was very resctrictive, data storage was expensive and FTP was limited. As soon as we thought we could take care of the services we needed, we moved escomposLinux.org to our home servers.

What's EcolNet current goal? When someone wants to start a project (say a little program, a big one, a documentation project, a game) he doesn't have at hand all the tools he might need. Usually, you'd have your code at sourceforge, maybe freshmeat, an IRC channel at openprojects.org, an FTP in some university lost in some lost place of the planet, and so on. With EcolNet, s/he who starts a project has all the support he may need, and everything centralized: www space, FTP, IRC channel, etc. That's basically what EcolNet offers. But of course, EcolNet is much more than that. EcolNet is a bunch of people who have become good friends enjoying Linux and its philosophy.

Where are the servers located? A map showing these EcolNet machines' location is shown here. You can see the machine's name, its IP, the volunteer's name, their email address and what kind of Internet connection the box has: [Click for image].

This is a nice example of what can be done with Dia. You can find more details about this diagram in the end of the article if you are interested.

So the idea is easy: we take a few computers with a relatively decent Internet connection and create a network providing services. Adding resources and allocating necesities and responsabilities, we have achieved a network which works on small computers and basic DSL Internet connections, depending just on ourselves and our capability to keep the boxes working. EcolNet also allows us to experiment the management of a Linux server, having fun with it, and puts on our shoulders the responsability to keep things working, which is sometimes a bit stressing. But that's what the root life is like, isn't it? ;)

What services do you run at EcolNet?

The list is quite long. EcolNet offers to the Linux community in Spain (completely non profit) the following services:

Electronic mail: POP3 and Webmail access.
Webpage hosting: Actualized via rsync. Anyone who has something to offer involving Linux has a place at the ecol project.
Anonymous FTP: To handle large stuff.
Mailing lists: Several mailing lists are run at ecol, the most important ones being the users' list and the admins' list.
News: We offer access to all the es.comp.os.Linux.* newsgroups to anyone who wants to read them. That's one of the services we wanted EcolNet for, to make sure whoever wanted to read the groups had the chance to have a decent service.
IRC: This is one of our favorites. Great fun at IRC.escomposLinux.org #escomposLinux, where we meet and chat about our stuff. Always nice to drop by.
PGP keys: Here we keep our PGP and GnuPG keys.
Time: At ntp.escomposLinux.org we keep a big clock to know what time it is.
CVS: Some of our users work on different projects, so CVS is a great tool for them.
Wiki: We have a little wiki that we use for different things, mainly for writing documentation when you just made someting work and you're still feel on fire :)

Besides those services, www.escomposLinux.org holds a lot of information, like Linux related links, book reviews and helpful documentation. And constantly growing.

The services distribution varies from time to time, either when some machines join the EcolNet or when someone experiences problems, like too much bandwidth consumption or some real tragedy. One of our primary servers had a terrible crash featured by the electrical company not long ago. We learnt a few things from that.

We are specially proud of these "Star" features:

Libertonia: A Linux weblog based on K5's Scoop. It started a few months ago and we have over 300 registered users today. Libertonia is Spanish for Freedonia, the imaginary country Groucho Marx ruled in "Duck Soup". Hence the penguin with a Groucho disguise as the logo. It's quite different from all other weblogs around, and this is why:

Users must be registered to be able to post.
As in K5, users vote on what gets published.
We can censor news and comments we consider off-topic or impolite. Censoring has very bad connotations and everybody is against it, so maybe you'd prefer to call it moderation. We provide the service with our money and sweat. We don't want any trolls having fun at our cost. As of today, we've only had nice and dialogant participants around, and they like the way things are managed. We don't host banners, we don't need money, we don't need hits. Thus, we do choose to have just a group of selected people taking part in Libertonia. Althogh articles usually don't have many comments (so far) compared to other weblogs, the quality of comments is good enough to compensate this, and competition makes the quality of the articles grow. As of today, we never had a troll and everybody lives happily and cordially in Libertonia.

The ecol comic strip: One of the most famous EcolNet services, Humor :) Originally in Spanish, now they are translated into English. They have become incredibly successful among the Spanish geeks, getting around 1000 visits daily, even though it's a weekly publication. Some popular weblogs link them, as well as scores of personal pages. As for the English version, over 100 people have subscribed to a mailing list, run by a guy called Simon, neither Spanish nor EcolNet-related, but still very nice :) Besides, the English version receives well over 100 visits/day. You might have already read some of them, if you're a regular Linux Gazette reader. [Like the one in this issue. --Editor] To deal with all that traffic, we have put up ten mirrors, which was kind of an interesting challenge. We still hope to be slashdotted someday and see how well we do. At EcolNet we like challenges. The comic strip is also EcolNet's "Poster Child", at least in Spain. By the way, I must disclose that I'm the proud father of the thing.
Our news servers: We are especially proud of our news servers. They are difficult to put up and maintain (hey, we find it difficult!) Neverteless, they are the base of the escomposLinux proyect. We go the extra mile to take care of the news servers. Here you can see a scheme of the servers we have now running, and who is feeding us externally. Kudos go to those feeders: [Click for image].

Who takes care of the whole thing? Is there something like a president? Do you have an EcolNet king?

There's a lot of people involved in EcolNet, which makes things "interesting". Fortunately, EcolNet volunteers are always talkative and very nice, and it's more a pleasure than a hasle to deal with them. Nevertheless, whenever there's people involved, there's a need for some kind of structure. At EcolNet there's a core of people, basically the "Five Good Men", who take care of the baby. They hold the experience and the know-how. If you want, you can see them as Primus intern Pares, First among Equals.

I've already talked about censoring in Libertonia, and I'll keep on reviewing "nasty" words. Next one is "dictatorship". Let me tell a story I especially like. Plato the philosopher said in The Republic that the perfect form of government is the dictatorship of a wise man. Unluckily, that's not possible in real life, or is it? Well, I think we do have that: we have a few people that have never been elected, that usually say what's to be done or they just do it, and everybody's happy with it. And it's been like that for many years and we keep rolling on, better and better each day. The rest of the volunteers of course have an opinion, and it's taken into account. Everything is pretty democratic, or at least it looks like it. It's hard to fight when everybody is nice and has the same goals. We all know we ride the same boat. We want to keep the boat afloat and we know who is the most capable, so everybody works together, rowing in the same direction.

How does EcolNet's decision-making process work? We have the admin mailing list, the users mailing list, an internal weblog and an online poll. Usually, infrastructure stuff gets discussed in the admin mailing list, because users don't need to know or be bothered with technical details. The users mailing list is for when things affect all the EcolNet population, both those running machines and users who have projects or documentation hosted. For minor discussions, we tend to use the internal weblog and its poll.

In Memoriam

The EcolNet project is dedicated to Tas, one of the original "Five Good Men", now staying with $DEITY.

Written by Javier Malonda.

There's a lot of people who should be listed in the credits, but they want to be anonymous. Just read http://www.escomposLinux.org.

If you're curious, you can find the Dia source XML code of the diagrams, as well as the diagrams themselves, at http://helvete.escomposLinux.org/ecolnet/ .