Teotwawki Net

Introduction

TEOTWAWKI means The End Of The World As We Know It, and the idea is to preserve the type of collaboration we are used to with the Internet in adverse, disaster-type situations and in areas that simply have no real hope of being connected.

This is only a proof-of-concept demo and is rather sloppy, but it does work. You get a local lighttpd web server with PHP, a DokuWiki wiki for personal use that can be seen by others currently on the network, and a PHP-based news reader (Web-News) and news server (InterNetNews-INN) that syncs up its news spool with every computer it can discover on the network that is broadcasting that it has Teotwawki Net installed on it.

If you like Perl like I do, Perl 5.10 is included as well (the only part written by me is a patch to the suck program and some shell and Perl scripts that do the broadcasting, receiving, mapping the network and executing the news spool sync-up via NNTP).

Demo

A few extra notes. once the /opt/tn/start.sh script is run you need to leave that terminal session open, otherwise the software will shut down. Also, there is only one empty newsgroup that is installed out of the box. (tn.general) but you can add as many newsgroups as you like by running /opt/tn/news/bin/ctlinnd newgroup groupnamehere in another terminal window as root while the system is running. All added news groups will be merged into other systems when they first try to sync up with each other. To stop the system, just go to the window you ran /opt/tn/start.sh in, and hit <control C>; it should shut itself down.

I am waiting for a book on managing Usenet to arrive, so that I can try and fine tune things and use less brute force, as I have never until about a month ago tried to do anything with Usenet other than use a news reader. I chose Network News because it is a tried and true technology and already has everything built into it to weed out duplicate articles, and it was designed to not require any sort of centralized management. It also can be used without any TCP/IP links at all via UUCP or some other method of batching articles and sending them. (USB sticks and SD cards come to mind, as well as traditional dial-up modem file transfers.)