SELF News
Monthly newsletter
Sharing knowledge about Free Software
Issue 15, 21 December 2007

Contents

1. SELF Servers
2. Free Knowledge Institute
3. Plmontsià
4. Merry Christmas!
5. Agenda
6. About

1. SELF Servers

In the last month two new servers have been added to the infrastructure of the SELF Project. The machines have been kindly provided by Sun-AMD and AT Computing. Both servers are located in the Amsterdam area and administered by David Jacovkis in collaboration with the TEG team.

Both servers are running Debian stable with a basic barebone install. On the server that hosts beta.selfplatform.eu we installed only the minimum requirements for Zope/Plone. This will be the main server for the public Beta version of the platform. At the same time the development team is moving to gnowsys 1.0 working on Postgres and with version control. This is expected to improve drastically the performance and response time of the platform.

The second server will be used for development and testing. With that purpose in mind we have set up virtualisation with Xen, one of the main free software solutions for virtualisation. The overhead introduced by virtualisation with Xen is quite small, which allows to run several virtual servers in the same physical machine with small performance loss. Since we have only one public IP for that server at the moment, the host machine works as a gateway/firewall for the virtual servers, doing NAT, DNAT and reverse proxying. In order to improve security, we will change the setup so that the gateway is also a virtual machine, exposing the host system only to the serial access for maintenance. We'll soon publish a more detailed description of this system that maybe others can find useful.

Contribution by David Jacovkis, UOC/ISOC.nl

2. Free Knowledge Institute

With pleasure we invite everybody for the official launch of the Free Knowledge Institute. The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) is a non-profit organisation that fosters the free exchange of knowledge in all areas of society. Inspired by the Free Software movement, the FKI promotes freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge.

The initiative comes from the founders of the SELF Platform, as a spin-off from the SELF coordinator ISOC.nl. The FKI develops projects in four different but highly related fields: education, technology, culture and science. Its multidisciplinary nature enables the seamless flow of information and expertise between different fields through global and transversal actions.

On Wednesday January 16, 2008, the Free Knowledge Institute will be presented during a New Years Reception organised by SELF, FKI, ISOC.nl and other organisations. ISOC.nl will then also celebrate its 10th anniversary!

More information (heavily under construction!)

Register for the launch

3. Plmontsià

On 15th November Jordi Serra went to the first day of “Plmontsià”, a workshop about free software run by the organisation “Montsià”. This is a joint initiative between the town councils of Amposta, La Sénia and Santa Bàrbara, and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya along with the Collegis Oficials d'Enginyeries en Informàtica de Catalunya. On the first day, which was devoted to information and education, Jordi presented the SELF project to those present and gave a brief demonstration of the platform.

Find a link to the project

Contribution by Hannah Margrett, UOC

4. Merry Christmas!

The SELF team at the UOC celebrated the arrival of the festive season with a Christmas lunch on Friday 14th December, along with the rest of the IT department at the university. That evening, the Dutch partner of SELF enjoyed a Christmas dinner with colleagues of the Free Floor in the cultural Volkskrantbuilding in Amsterdam. Though one might think the holidays have started already, the whole SELF team is working very hard to achieve more goals before the end of 2007. Early 2008 the project will enter a new phase again, with a lot of news coming up!

We would like to wish all our friends and colleagues in the SELF community a very happy Christmas, and a healthy and prosperous New Year!

5. Agenda

All on January 16th, 2008, former Volkskrantbuilding, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

6. About

SELF News is a monthly newsletter about the SELF Project and related issues. SELF aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.

Information about SELF:
http://selfproject.eu/

Consortium Partners:

• Internet Society Netherlands
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Goteburg University
• Internet Society Bulgaria
• Fundación Vía Libre
• Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education
  

Newsletter editor:
Hinde ten Berge

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