What is Squeak?#

Squeak is a tiny solar powered community webserver channelling old-school geocities vibes. Inspired by compost.party (a solar powered webserver on a phone) if you are looking for a free web host for small static websites and are happy to have neighbours then feel free to apply to @smallsolar@techhub.social (mastodon) for an account. Due to the tinyness of the server there is capacity for about 10 users.

How tiny is the server?#

  • OS: Alpine Linux edge riscv64
  • Board: milk-v duo
  • Host: Cvitek. CV180X ASIC. C906.
  • Kernel: Linux 5.10.4-tag-
  • CPU: cv180x
  • Memory: 54.93 MiB
  • Disk (/): 800.32 MiB - ext4
  • Disk (/home): 27.54 GiB - ext4

What features do I get?#

Each user will be provided with a user account on the server and an ability to log in via ssh, the linux setup is fairly minimal however there are the standard commands as well as git. hugo is installed to help build static websites. Currently each user gets 2GiB of space.

The server has nginx running and is setup to direct requests to your user’s public_html folder which gives you a old school address e.g. https://squeak.solarcene.community/~smallsolar/

What could I use it for?#

Do you want to run a blog? Document your projects? Or perhaps you’ve got some digital zines that you want to host?

As the server is hosted in the UK its a little bit tricky as we also need to ensure that the Online Safety Act is considered, the offer of hosting is for people who are publishing legal things, its not recommended to run or have other situations where visitors can post as you will then have to complete risk assessments etc. For more information check out gov.uk - to be honest the system works best as a static host.

The webserver is a community server and so the request is that all the users are good neighbours, we’ll develop some community guidelines to help with anything that isn’t easily solved with a conversation.

The Future#

If Squeak is popular then I’d be happy to setup further tiny servers on different (eccentric devices!) - I’ve got some slightly crazy ideas.