Blog - /Tech

A very big milestone has been reached last week for http://hcoop.net/. We've got our new systems working smoothly enough that we are able to re-open membership. I am one of the sysadmins there, and have invested quite a bit of effort into it this past year.

Why should you consider joining HCoop?

• You get to use a very slick custom domain-specific language called Domtool to configure your websites, DNS, and email aliases. It's fairly easy to configure new domains, since there are plenty of examples, and all settings for a domain can be in a single file. Domtool also has an Emacs mode, which is already installed on our systems.
• We use AFS and Kerberos, and have thorough and easy-to-understand instructions on how to make good use of this technology. This is a great way to gain a little familiarity with AFS.
• The costs for colocation are split evenly between the members, with the goal of keeping things under $5 per month per person. (During the migration to the new machines, we switched to a voluntary share-based system to cover costs, but this should change in a month.)
• Our machines are co-located in a Peer1 datacenter in New York City, New York, which has a pretty good connection to the Internet.
• We have an active and friendly IRC channel on the Freenode network at #hcoop.
• We have a gitweb instance running at http://git.hcoop.net/, and publishing a project there is as easy as symlinking or cloning a project to your ~/.hcoop-git/ directory.
• You have the option of storing your email on our servers, which can then be accessed by an SSL-capable IMAP or POP3 client. You may opt to have your Email processed with SpamAssassin, which adds extra headers to your messages that are useful for filtering spam.
• Our machines run on Debian Etch, with some custom parts. As an example, we have a custom Emacs 22 package — maintained by me — which retains all of the Emacs manuals.