Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.
This July, we'll be talking about the SLRPNK Outage, the upcoming 50501 Protest, and fun projects to do with others to build community.
🌟 Community Highlights 🌟
- !Foraging@slrpnk.net - A new foraging community, where we come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!
- !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net - A community about implementing urbanist improvements Via direct action
- !Signs@slrpnk.net - A community celebrating clever and inspiring anti-fascist art at demonstrations.
🔌 The Great SLRPNK Outage of 2025 🪫
Last month, SLRPNK went offline on the 4th of June, and lasted a total of 7 days; the longest downtime since its creation.
The length of that downtime was due to multiple unexpected and unfortunate circumstances, all intersecting at once. For one, our main Sysadmin, poVoq, had taken on obligations that took him outside of the country for an extended period of time (3 months). In addition, the other sysadmins that had physical access to the server coincidentally also had taken on responsibilities or had gone on vacation, which prevented them from being able to access the server as well.
As the server seemed to be working perfectly fine for a long period of time, it didn't seem like it would be much of a risk to leave it unattended for that duration. Unfortunately, things chose to go wrong after everyone who could attend to it, now couldn't..
The primacy cause of the outage was a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP, in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire).
Previously, our ISP would assign new IP's to us slowly, 3 times a year. But recently they have been assigning them more frequently. IPfire normally catches this, automatically changing the Dynamic DNS to the new IP, and all was dandy. However, before the trip, IPfire was updated, which introduced a new and yet unknown bug, which ultimately prevented it from automatically updating the DNS when a new IP was assigned. All other fail-safes previously put in place by poVoq to notify him of this problem also failed, which lead us to assume there was a hardware failure in the Firewall, preventing us from being able to access the server remotely.
However, a few days later, poVoq received signs of life in the form of an automated e-mail sent from the server, indicating that the it was still running, meaning something else was preventing access. They would have to find out what the new assigned IP was manually to access it.
With the help of a friend, they were able to help track down the new IP by performing a port-scan on over five hundred thousand IP's in a subnet that was known to contain our server, narrowing it down to 20 possible IP addresses by looking for open ports that are used by XMPP servers (as we also host an XMPP chat messaging service). After trying each one, they finally hit pay dirt, and were able to log in for the first time since the outage! By the 11th of June, we were back up and running.
We'll be taking many lessons from this event to bolster the reliability and accessibility of the server to hopefully prevent an outage of this scale from happening again, such as:
- Switching to a new and hopefully more reliable Firewall/Dynamic DNS software & adding additional out of band notifications on IP change
- Installing a KVM on the main firewall that is connected to a separate IP to make it possible to connect to it directly, giving us the ability to reboot and troubleshoot remotely even if the main connection is lost.
- Experiment with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS, which could allow for a more stable connection, and could be used to host essential services like our XMPP, which would help it remain accessible even if the main server went down.
As unfortunate as this outage was, due to the efforts of poVoq and his friend, it was thankfully far, far shorter than it could've been, and we're extremely grateful to have such a dedicated admin hosting our little corner of the web. Three cheers to poVoq and his friend! :D
📢 Good Trouble ✊🏿
Last month on June 14, millions took to the street in strategic non-violent protest. News about the results of past protests, and announcements of new direct actions are welcome in all of the localized communities at 50501.chat.
While protests are good for demonstrating unrest with the regime, they are also extremely potent milieus for sharing information with like-minded individuals. It is typical to find political and labor organizations distributing information from xeroxed flyers to printed newspapers. If you feel inclined, we encourage you to invite people you meet in the streets to join the Fediverse. If you come up with flyers or zines to help do this, we'd love it if you shared it in this month's meta to help others do the same.
John Lewis was a civil rights leader who eventually transitioned to become a United States politician. He is famous for saying, "Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America." This July 17th, organizations across the world are mobilizing for a sequel to the wildly successful "No Kings" protest, called "Good Trouble Lives On" in honor of the five-year anniversary of John Lewis' death of cancer at 80 years old.
While this protest movement is nominally for the United States, the trend towards authoritarianism as the climate crisis worsens is a world problem. Mobilizations have already been announced in Florence and Dublin. This is not a 'US' problem, it's an 'us' problem. If we hope to push back authoritarianism, we must do it together through solidarity. The signs in the streets remind us that we are part of a world-wide resistance movement - from Ukraine's resistance to Russia's imperialism, Palestine's struggle to be free from the tyranny of the IDF, to the barricades that just went up recently in Belgrade, Serbia. We are all connected.
🛠 Fun Projects to Build Community 👩🏾🏭
Meeting your neighbors, fostering goodwill, and having a real sense of community is a powerful thing. It's the main building block that all other actions we have in our arsenal rely upon. Without it, we're far less able to build the vision we all share of a more hopeful future, and less capable to resist the darker visions others have for us.
With summer here and hopefully some good weather gracing a good amount of us, now's the time to bust out some tools (maybe from your local library if they have a tool section!), gather some friends, heed the primal call, and do some solarpunk style community building with direct action!
In the clickable drop-down below are a few ideas to get started. I'm hoping more of you chime in with your own in the comments as well! :D
🔽 Community Projects🔽
- First off, seek out a local group already engaging in mutual aid in your area. That could take the form of a Food Not Bombs chapter, a local Anarchist group, or even a progressive church if you're in a more rural area and that's all that's around. This is possibly the best method to meet like-minded folk who you can befriend, and who will already be open to the idea of fostering and building community with you, and might even join in on some of these other projects!
- If know of an area near you where food security is an issue, building a community garden is a great way to alleviate that while also fostering a sense of community.
- If you have a front yard, that could be a great place to create a small community garden that your friends and neighbors could partake in with you! But If you live in an HOA which doesn't allow that, it might be worth considering reaching out to receptive neighbors and collectively joining the HOA board to change the rules. Alternatively, if you can manage to find a larger piece of land to, that would be ripe for a larger collective community garden. Garden's like these are incredibly powerful community building tools, and could also be a main source of food to stock your community fridge with!
- Little Free Libraries are a great way to spread goodwill with your neighbors, and encourage kids in your neighborhood to read. It's also a good place stock with cool zines! (Check out our zines community at !zines@slrpnk.net for info on how to make them and other ideas)
- Engage in some Guerilla Gardening! It's not only fun to do with friends, but (over time) can create green spaces with lots of shade, or even become a food forest, which can be a gathering place for your community to hang out and connect (and that shade will be critical to making climate change a little more bearable too). Just be sure to use native species in your area! They're already adapted to your local climate, and won't out compete with other native plants. Do your research!
🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪
Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
Community Wiki - Moderators: you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!
Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
Etherpad - Collaborative document editor
I'm sympathetic to the tragedy of tainted nostalgia. I had a similar experience with the author of Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card. It was distressing discovering that some of the literature that raised me and became in many ways my story -- not only had a corrupted source, but contained questionable themes that originated from that corruption and were always present in the work. I wouldn't describe exposure to news about the homophobic war monger as traumatic, but I do understand the grief that comes with having to re-examine and re-contextualize childhood beliefs and memories.
At the turn of the century, it was ambiguous whether the religious right would continue to wield political power. Harry Potter's unflappable rise in spite of theocratic pearl-clutching about witchcraft in literature gave hope that a less religiously dogmatic future was possible. In a time when scholastic book sales were flagging, JK Rowling helped millions of children to learn to love reading. You're not only losing the good feelings associated with childhood nostalgia, but also a shibboleth to a community of agnostic people who love reading for readings' sake. You're not wrong to want to preserve some part of that. It's not wrong to grieve for the parts that can't be saved.
You're also not a bad person for loving the literature. Fantasy is the power to imagine different lives in different worlds, a prerequisite for changing our own. I find it difficult to think of a work that does not have some suspect themes, and all authors are flawed so some degree. In a world where unparalleled success in fantasy writing didn't give someone policy power to harm of millions of people, a conversation about Rowling's fringe ideas about gender identity would have a very different tone. While not unique to the Wizarding World, one of the redeemable themes of that work is that individual people, each doing their own small part, can defeat an evil that is much greater than any one of them. Your small part may be to come to terms with the need to walk away.
On the other hand, your childhood experience gives you a rare power - you're on much better footing to empathize and soften the blow to others who are at a different stage of grief with the same struggle. You're in a much better position to weather the abuse you will receive if you stay, because you understand the place of hurt that it comes from. Harry Potter is about unexpected people rising to a challenge, and by joining the fight against JK Rowling, you are honoring the best parts of what you discovered through her literature.