This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Assuming slrpnk stands for solar punk - that produces funny little theories in my mind about the server location.
Their servers are located in Portugal I believe and do indeed run on solar power! They gave details of their set up on their wiki page but... that was on the server that's gone down so... have a read in July I guess?
it's on archive.org
Server hosting
This is a work in progress
Slrpnk.net is hosted by F-hub.org, a volunteer driven and non-commercial effort to host federated community services in a resource efficient and ethical way. F-hub.org grew out of a community of open-source game developers (freegamedev.net) that has existed since the early 2000s.
All the servers are operated and maintained (as a hobby) by one of the founding members and are currently located on the Azores in Portugal. Connectivity is provided through a dedicated high-speed fibreglass connection.
Hardware
The F-hub.org servers are based on second-hand consumer PC and data-centre hardware, but optimized for low energy consumption. Battery backup power is provided and data is stored with triple redundancy (off-site backups are still a work in progress). Electricity is currently provided by the utility grid (about 60% green-energy, mostly from a geothermal power-plant) but it is a work in progress to upgrade to a on-site solar PV system for near 100% renewable power.
Slrpnk.net itself currently runs on a dedicated 6th gen Intel CPU server with 8 threads, 16GB RAM and SATA SSD storage in raid configuration. Image uploads are stored on a large HDD raid array. All data is snapshotted and transferred for backup to a second shared server on daily basis.
External services
Given how difficult it is to have outgoing email accepted by the large email providers, all emails are currently routed through an external SMTP server hosted by OVH in France (same as the domain registration and DNS routing).
There are backup plans to move the servers to a co-location data-center owned by Altice, should this be required for scaling. However, monthly rent of rack-space is quite costly (starts at around 300€/month), thus this will require a substantial regular donation base to be possible.
I think they're located in the Azores, and yes, running their own servers on solar (of course) and other renewable energy. Coolest instance out there.
I hope they come back :)
We will, promise! :D
Wondering if a volunteer could go to the physical location necessary to restore service. If it's in Athens Greece, I can make the trip.
Edit: The server is located in Azores, the flight would cost 415eur, I cannot afford that, maybe someone in Portugal could help?
Is it in a data centre or someone's house? If the latter, would they let a stranger in?
Surely they would need a backup and replicate db to so in case of hardware failure they switch over.
Sounds like they could improve their setup.
Too much of a single point of failure.
Off topic, but in Portugal was the first time me, a Central European, ever ate a ripe Papaya. Yum! Thanks to the Azores. The shit you get in the supermarkets round here is useless. Same for mangoes, usually.
You are in luck then, because both are climacteric fruits, meaning they continue to ripe after being harvested, due to producing ethylene gas that triggers the ripening
Throw them in a paper bag and let them rest at room temp. If you want to speed up the process, add a ripe banana or apple (or other ripe climacteric fruits)
The taste just isn't the same.
You might have eaten a different cultivar than those exported. In that case, I agree, there are so many different varieties that we never get to taste, supermarkets usually only have 1 or 2 different types