We’ve been a bit quiet of the last few days. For one there’s simply too much happening right now.

Good news: We accidentally the whole internet connection!
“The what?”, you say? Yes, the whole internet connection.
shackspace now has a 50/10Mbit line connected. At first try on the advertised day on top of that. Took some punching of the tech guys and various levels of social engineering using phone numbers you’re not usually supposed to call, but a team of fellow hackers managed to get everything in order.

Omnomnomnom is the word of the next item on the list. A very short term (<2h) decision one Monday night resulted in shackspace now having not only a softdri^W club-mate vending machine. No, we now have a snack vending machine!

We’ve also had significant upgrades on the storage front. Large numbers of sheet metal selfs have been acquired off eBay at discount prices. Finally enough storage space for all our stuff (for now).

The portal system is working again as well, at least for one of the two doors we need to control. Properly implementing the system for the outside door will set us back at least 600 EUR. Yikes.

Quoting the official announcement:

As tickets to Google I/O were sold out within ~50 minutes, worldwide “Google I/O Extended Events” (mostly organized by GTUGs) will make it possible to watch the keynotes live on a stable stream with other interested developers, fans and friends.
The Stuttgart GTUG and the Black Forest GTUG join in together to bring Google I/O to Stuttgart!
There will be food & drinks - and Swag - for all participants and a (hopefully) stable livestream.

Date: May 10th and May 11th, 2011
Time: 17:00 CET, the keynotes start on 18:00 CET
Location: shackspace Stuttgart (Ulmer Straße 255, 70327 Stuttgart, Maps) - www.shackspace.de

We did it!

This weekend we’ve managed to move everything we’ve planned to move in two days in just one single day.
Thanks a lot to everyone involved! This would not have been possible without the help of a great many people.

A very special thanks goes out to everyone who donated to us, be it through PayPal, wire transfer or BitCoins.
You’re awesome! We’ll be putting the donations to good use, paying for renovation, infrastructure, and moving costs.
If you would still like to donate something, please do not hesitate ;-)

From now on shackspace is located at:

shack e.V.
Ulmer Straße 255
70327 Stuttgart-Wangen

We’re still working on many details and are busy unpacking and setting up everything. The shackspace open status monitor is not working yet (give the space a call at +49 (0)178 6624218 to check if it’s open), Internet is supposed to be hooked up some time next week, the WiFi door lock is not yet installed and there’s a lot of boxes piled up in the lounge.
Over the following days we’ll push out more info on what happened this past couple of weeks. Photos were taken and videos recorded, there’s stories to be told.

Again, to everyone involved in whichever way: Thank you, thank you so much!

It’s time, we have to move!

On March 31st Deutsche Bahn (owner of the property) will close down the whole area around the old shackspace location at Stuttgart’s Nordbahnhof. Everything still left in the location after that date is lost.
shackspace is on the move this weekend!

We’ve already rented a big truck and are ready to get everything done Friday/Saturday/Sunday this week (we kind of have to).
If you want to drop by and help out, come join us Saturday morning 10am sharp and Sunday 11am sharp at the old shackspace location (Äusserer Nordbahnhof 12).

If you want to join us, please let us know! We’ve got a wiki page set up where we’ll be organizing this weeks workload. We’ve also got a mailing list just for the move.

The “server room taskforce”, as the team calls themselves, spent the whole of Wednesday and parts of Thursday at 0xff (the new shackspace location) where they brought in two 42RU and one 21RU racks, patch panels, switches, etc.
Result after ~15 hours of work is that the smaller rack is in position and already equipped with two patch panels for the LAN-Network, which would work theoretically. Also the 42RU IBM racks are in position, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds since those things weigh easily over 100kg and are about two meters high.
We found out how to disassemble the racks so they’d fit into the elevator, transported them to the 1st floor and reassembled them in the server room. But when we wanted to place the first server in the rack we noticed the whole rack had a width of 19” plus an extra ~10cm. Now we need to find a way to “shrink” this IBM Blade Center rack to a 19” standard rack. If you have any hints for us don’t hesitate to drop us a comment below this post.

It was a very busy weekend indeed.
Removing the excess walls left in the new shackspace location by the company who owned the building before turned out to be harder than expected. The wall elements are anything but light-weight (estimates are in the range of 80 to 90/kg per element). However, the hacker lounge and seminar room areas are now properly opened up and the wall between workshop, storage area, and electronics lab was left in for simplicities sake.

After the huge set-back ruining the floor of the workshop during carpet removal we initially thought that this will not work. However, another try with the carpet covering the hacker lounge showed way better results. The carpet is fully gone with the screed undamaged. There was still some patches of old glue sticking to the floor but that was solved with power tools and violence.

Check out the gallery for some more photos.

The last weekend was full of hard work, but it paid out, and now we can proudly announce that the roomforming is completed.
Many walls had to fall and it took us a lot of time to discover all the screws that the builders of the walls had hidden, but we made it and shackspace 2.0 is now looking as shown on this sketch (click to enlarge).

The last walls to fall weren’t needed for any other purpose so three hackers killed them the hacker way ;)

Doing our part for the reunification of countr^W rooms :)

The ongoing renovation and expansion of shackspace also allowed us to build a new home for our servers.
By now the server room walls are fully covered with sound insulation foam to keep noise levels low in the rest of the space.
We also reverse engineered the former LAN-infrastructure of the Building and pulled existing Cat5 (sadly, no Cat5e) cables down from the 2nd floor to our rooms in the 1st floor.
Now that the server room now is nearly ready for the racks we will start to bring in 2 40RU racks for the servers and 1 smaller rack for the network infrastructure.
Thanks to all the helpers who made it possible to get so far within a few days.

Late Friday afternoon and all of Saturday we were hard at work at the new shackspace location, moving walls and trying to get the old (and admittedly kind of disgusting) office carpet removed.

Removing the walls is pretty tedious but well manageable working in teams. However, we noticed that that removing the walls was not possible without causing some damage to ceiling, pillars and flooring which we’ll have to fix later on.

The first image is a partial view of the largest room we’ll have, the open hacker’s lounge. The lounge will cover almost the same space as the whole of shackspace 1.0 (100 to 120sqm), so everyone can look forward to a nice, big, central community area.

What’s not working out so well is removing the old carpet. Someone thought it would be nice to glue the carpet to the floor by putting glue everywhere. This, combined with the fact that the carpet has been in there for what feels like decades caused carpet and screed to pretty much become inseparable (as can be seen in the second photo on the left). Since this wasn’t exactly planned for we’ll now have to look for alternatives on how to deal with this without causing more damage than necessary to keep costs within limits.

With the tools we currently have access to it turns out that getting the carpet out in just one weekend won’t be happening. As always, work in progress :)

We’ve also set up a gallery specifically for the move to the new location dubbed 0xff (the address is Ulmer Strasse 255). There should be more photos coming in over the next few days.