This was posted on the other site. It can be found below on this post.
They talk about how even Jellyfin & Jitsi were valuable for dealing with government’s actions in shutting down the internet. Does anything else come to mind? In addition to giving advice, can we host anything to help people in this kind of situation?
Suddenly our Self Hosted application became more than just hobby.
If you already don’t know, Bangladesh was disconnected from the internet for majority of the last week due to government order. It was shut down without any warning. We were put under curfew 24/7, so no leaving home.
On the second day of curfew, me, with nothing to do, figured the intranet in our country still worked. So I opened my Jellyfin service up and gave access to my immediate family and friends. Then we had people stepping up. One opened a simple chat application. Believe me, I never felt happier reading messages from a bunch of random people on the internet. Once people started communicating it only got better. We had a jitsi meet up and running within a few hours. People opened up their media library. Last couple of days, I almost didn’t miss the traditional internet.
I have to thank you guys for all the encouragement. Also I do have a few questions for you guys.
I’m fearing this will not be the last time we will be blocked from the world. What can we do to make things even better next time? One major problem was TLS CERTS stopped working. So the communication was in http using IP address
What are some apps to host if the same situation to arise again?
Sorry for the bad English, not my first language.
What Is Kiwix?
Kiwix is a non-profit organization and a free and open-source software project dedicated to providing offline access to free educational content. The name “Kiwix” is a play on the word “Wiki” as it represented our initial goal of making Wikipedia accessible offline.
I found this for standing it up:
Second this, always have a device preloaded with Kiwix and one of the wikipedia dumps. A new vesrion is uploaded every few (~6 months). The full English wikipedia dump with images (low-res versions only though) is only 103GB.
Excellent answer!
Does someone have a good guide? The guides I find are a few years old. I will relay this to them in the meantime
Endless OS had everything bundled
It still does? They have a version for people with internet access, and a version for people without, with a heavy dose of offline applications and information. You can also download more offline resources after you install it.
Just download a copy of a recent wikipedia dump. You can open it in the Kiwix desktop application (work fine even on an old laptop), the android app (though I’ve never tried opening a full 100GB dump with a phone, not sure if it would work well), or install the
kiwix-toolpackage and serve the.zimfile withkiwix-serve(https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Kiwix-serve). You’d also probably want a reverse proxy/usual basic web server/security setup around that.
A ham radio station.
Orchestration software is probably going to be the most useful in an actual disaster. Something for labor and task management. Mesh area network hub would be pretty useful as well. If you had Starlink, you’d be the hero of your neighborhood by providing Internet to everyone in range.
Here’s an interesting list to look through as well: https://github.com/DisasterTechCrew/awesome-disastertech
If you already don’t know, Bangladesh was disconnected from the internet for majority of the last week due to government order. It was shut down without any warning. We were put under curfew 24/7, so no leaving home. On the second day of curfew, me, with nothing to do, figured the intranet in our country still worked.
Anyone know more about that? Is that just customer-to-customer communication?
I’ve been fortunate enough to never experience a government-mandated internet shutdown, but I figure the ISPs just disconnect the gateways. If I’m understanding that correctly, it sounds like they just used the ISP network to carry traffic internally. Very clever!
I am curious too. It has been hard to get much information out between the internet shutdown, the language barrier, and the lack of press freedoms. I will post a link if I find anything!
Yeah, if you find more info about that, please share.
If that is the case, DNS would definitely be a crucial service to self-host and make available.
Sounds like a few people need to spin up a DNS server.
I think it would be cool to create a WiFi mesh that spans multiple buildings. You could have wired and wireless connections.
The internet was designed to route around failure. Taking down an isp upstream wouldn’t generally impact internal routing, or routing between them if they’re peering.
One thing that comes to mind is an NTP server, or if you have a beefy server, you could host maps
Well, that escalated quickly…
host maps
It does require a beefy server (rendering tiles is CPU/RAM-intensive, storing pre-rendered tiles is expensive on storage) It should be doable on limited hardware if only a small area.
I think the better move would be keeping/distributing a local copy of the OsmAnd android APK and a few maps for the app. Because you’ll not be able to provide map access to people from your server if the Internet/local fiber/phone network is down - this way everyone can have their own full copy of the map.
I’m not sure about the method to extract map data from the app storage directory though.
I like this way of thinking! Excited to see what smarter people than myself come up with
Briar, for communication during internet blackouts or when there is no connectivity at all.
Meshtastic!
Briar
Not self hosted but it is great for bad situations.
If you have some technical neighbors you could work to create a mesh. Get a bunch of devices and mesh them together to create a internal network spanning your neighborhood. You could theoretically have thousands of nodes. This may get you in trouble though so stick to Briar when threatened
I found this as well
