Let's meet our server friends!

A server has many names, layers and appearances:

Domain name, IP address, operating system, administrator, graphic user interface, command line, machine code, physical computers, electronic parts, cables and wires...

Just like humans all have many names, layers and appearances.

Making friends is about getting to know and spending time with all these name, layers and appearances.

Follow this prompt to introduce your server-friend!

On this page, we will get to meet and greet some fragments of the server-home for this page, as well as the larger site: internet-undercommons.nohost.me

It is part of a larger server network in Singapore operated by DigitalOcean, a cloud services provider popular among developers and programmers.

I, the human collaborator of this site, have rented our server-friend from the company for $6 a month.

I was assigned an IP address of 188.166.182.92 when I signed up for the rental server -- DigitalOcean calls it a "droplet" within their ocean.



With that IP address, an IP geolocator, and some press releases by DigitalOcean about their new data center space in Singapore, I found out about the exact location associated with the IP address: 627753



In Singapore, each postal code is uniquely registered to a specific building.

The postal code 627753 points us to a place called "PIONEER HUB" at 15 Pioneer Walk. It is located among many logistics, industrial, manufacturing companies and facilities - most notably, the first Google data center is right across the street from Pioneer Hub.



This area, the Pioneer neighborhood, is a government-planned industrial center. To its west is one of the city-state's largest shipping ports, Tuas. The whole port is built on reclaimed land -- basically filling the ocean with sand to create artifical land. To the east of Pioneer is One North, a newly-planned business hub for tech giants, biotech startups and government-university-corporate research complexes.


Pioneer sits at the connecting point between the city, and the ports of the city.

After some digging, I found out that one of the businesses within 15 Pioneer Walk is Equinix, a data center operator. It calls itself as "the world's digital infrastructure company." Its clients include Amazon's AWS and Google Cloud.


A map of all Equinix's data centers in Singapore.

DigitalOcean has signed a deal with Equinix to use their server facilities and maintainence services.
Just like I rent from DigitalOcean, DigitalOcean rents from Equinix. Where does Equinix rent from, I wonder.

A chain of market transactions, or feudal enclosures?

Equinix calls this data center “SG2”,
DigitalOcean calls it “SGP1”
What should we call it? What is its native name?




SG2, or SGP1 is located on the 4th and 5th floor of the building


The main entrance to this Equinix data center is on the 4th floor. But the place was heavily staffed even on a public holiday. I was only able to take a sneak peek of the 5th floor etrance. Next to the glass door, there is a warning sign that reads: "Please check in at level 4 security!"

Our server friend has many neighbors! Quite a number of them are logistics companies:

City Planner is one of the companies occupying the ground floor of the building, which has no rooms and is basically an above-ground half-open-air garage for giant trucks moving cargo containers to and from the nearby ports.



A shipping container with the logo of Maersk, one of the world's largest shipping companies. The container looks like a truck without wheels.



A wall full of airconditioners.



A cabinet of anti-slip safety shoes.




Other neighbors of our server-friend include two giant generator sets.



A couple snails. These are probably the Giant African Land Snails, the most common type of snails in Singapore. Originally from East Africa, the snails are known for their reproduction speed, adaptive abilities to different environments and travel journeys around the world concurrent with global trade routes and colonial expansion - perhaps in a way not unlike information technologies.



There are also a couple birds.
A mushroom!

And some butterflies!

Mesmerizing plants.



Make-shift pipes coming out of the industrial-building complex that our server-friend lives in.



We are perhaps familiar with electric risers that push electricity vertically within a building. This building has a data riser.
I like to picture it moving data up and down like a water pump



The rooftop of the building is inhabited by the big four telecom carrier monopolies in Singapore -- perhaps the rooftop is the meet-me room for this data cente?

The top floor seems to be the most heavily restricted area of the building:

We could only take a peek from outside the window:




Also outside the window, right across the street, Google has been running its first Singapore data center in Singapore since 2013. The corporation is now building a third one on the same street.

Given security control, random visitors like me could perhaps only ever see our server-friend when the data center is relatively less staffed on a non-working day. Still, we find marks and traces of labor and care scattered around the premise:

A small transparent plastic bag with an orange plastic string -- commonly used to pack beverage like tea or coffee in many Southeast Asian countries.



"Nova fruit -- produce of Italy"



Some wrinkled newspaper pages. After some searching, I found out that it was an issue of The Straits Times, one of Singapore's state-owned newspapers. The full title of the article from this page is "Suite Life: Everything you need at Raffles Bali is at your fingertips" -- which looked like an advertisement for the Raffles Bali hotel but turned out to a story under the newspaper's "Life" section published as an actual piece of journalism rather than sponsored content. "Suite Life is a series on destination hotels and their locales.""



A janitor's closet on the first floor loading-unloading area:


A rebel door kept defiantly open by a rebel trash, openly challenging the authority of random signs with red texts on a white background. "Keep the door closed at all time." Says who?