7mo ago

What self-hosted services can help during a crisis or emergency? This is for those affected OR those who want to help

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.

33 comments

https://kiwix.org
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:
https://github.com/jonboiser/dockerized-kiwix-server
- 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
  
  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-tool package and serve the .zim file with kiwix-serve (https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Kiwix-serve). You'd also probably want a reverse proxy/usual basic web server/security setup around that.
- So it's like a LibraryBox with an Archiver?

have you seen https://meshtastic.org/, going to look into some devices as a backup
- Meshtastic is a great one. People are making all kinds of software for it. I saw someone developing a BBS for it. For those who want a summary: Meshtastic is a very low bandwidth radio system for creating mesh networks. The speed of data transfer is similar to the modems of the 80s, so you aren't transferring anything but text. But the range is good and the hardware is cheap, and it is completely stand alone. It can normally pair with something like a phone for ease of access, but has its own dedicated device for a radio.
- Jeff Geerling did a video on them, got me super interested and thinking on how to implement and use with family.
- If you're interested in Meshtastic, take a look at Reticulum : https://reticulum.network/
  
  Very interesting, might be a thing to run over LoRa

A ham radio station.
- And the skills to use it; they’re not plug-and-play. Get you license and get on the air to hone those skills.
  
  7-3s

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.
- 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.

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

One thing that comes to mind is an NTP server, or if you have a beefy server, you could host maps
- 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.
- Well, that escalated quickly...

I like this way of thinking! Excited to see what smarter people than myself come up with

Meshtastic!

I like to store useful medical and survival information either in my ArchiveBox and/or kiwix containers. I've also been meaning to put together a local wiki.js with more custom info. TubeArchivist is really good too for storing instructional videos for offline use, or videos I find incredibly useful that have a strong likelihood of being taken down by YouTube so I save them first.

Briar, for communication during internet blackouts or when there is no connectivity at all.

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
https://www.meshpointone.com/

If the government did it - I would be very angry. Do you know how much internet help with democracy in the world? Think of it as shutting down all libraries with books, and forbidde any kind of communication.
It would of course try to setup some communication and gather people. I currently only have one irc server. I guess people want something webbased as they probably don't have the client software.
I would probably lose my job as well as it is a software as a service company that require internet to function.

Retroshare.net

33 comments

What Is Kiwix?