Urdu Project

The Urdu Project is the project to offer CNM Cyber services in Urdu. Its predecessor is the Russian-language project that has been launched in Ukraine, but slowed down there by the war.

Recruitment

Proposal

We plan to hire 3-4 Urdu-speaking graduates from the initial training immediately on the spot and will work on more vacancies.

• The candidates don't need either education nor experience in order to be accepted.
• The initial training lasts for 3-4 weeks; our training is free.
• The initial rate is $0.9 per hour, which rises up to $3 in 2-3 months.
• The job is generic coordinator's work -- our initial training fully prepares for that.
• The work is remote; the schedule is flexible.
• Usually, we give 20 hours a week, so my staffers have room for everything else.
• The initial training is challenging for many; in Ukraine, only 3 people succeeded to get to the end out of about 350 candidates. If the Pakistani statistics would be similar, we look at about 500 candidates in Pakistan, right?

We would also like to target ladies sitting at home; men are usually bread-winners, their requirements are higher.

Onboarding

We don't interview the candidates. Instead, 100% of them have been forwarded to three courses:

1. One introduces the project itself,
2. The second describes its technology, and
3. The last teaches how to work with us.

All courses take about 3-4 weeks. The courses feature not only lectures, but also task assignments -- they are not easy to complete. In Ukraine, we have given a job offer to everyone who has completed all of the courses.

Technology

Main wikipage: CNMC bare-metal

Sourcing

Advertising

We are going to post ads at Facebook job posting page in Pakistan and Sialkot, as well as Instagram at the 10$ ad in start level. In Ukraine, the announcements were posted on job-search websites, rabota.ua and work.ua

Handouts

We can hire one person and provide him with a bike and patrol. We will try handouts on specific days or occasions. The budget is about 4-5$/day in wages plus the cost of handouts' production.

Events

To give candidates a chance to get in touch, we tried weekly videoconferences in Ukraine, but really few folks ever joined, so we postponed. We believe that web conferencing might be helpful in Pakistan. We plan to offer those once a month and broadcast from a hall for rent, where 100+ people can participate in person, while using that facility -- https://www.sbcc.org.pk/

Referrals

To motivate referrals, we offered $75 per hire as a finder fee in Ukraine. However, that referral idea didn't work there. With regard to advertising, the choice is to promote the project itself or its referrals.

Server layer

To support the project in Ukraine technologically, we created a platform with 3 VPS and one proxmox instance at hetzner.de in Germany. We plan to deploy a similar platform for the project in Pakistan. Alternatively, OVH servers have been considered.

Bare-metal

The characteristics of the server that supports the project in Ukraine are as follows:

• Dedicated Root Server SB35
• Intel Core i7-3930
• 2x HDD SATA 3,0 TB
• 8x RAM 8192 MB DDR3
• NIC 1 Gbit - Intel 82579LM
• Location: FSN1 (Falkenstein/Vogtland, Germany) -- DC7
• Rescue system (English)

For the project in Pakistan, we plan to buy an additional bare-metal server at hetzner.de at the same datacenter with our first one. The additional server shall be similar to the current one, probably, with a half of the RAM.

Disk-redundancy

What type of RAID are you going to set up? About Raid system please ask to server hosting, attach hardware raid system in it, so it will be good for our work, and speedup, also it will secure our data on the hard-disk level.

Virtualization

OS installation first, so it will be proxmox, so we can create some shared container or kvm based container there as per our usage.

Server security

What do you plan for its security? Firewalls?

• Config Server Security and Firewall (CSF) (so when anyone do wrong attempt with our server it will auto blocked on three wrong attempt, also we can block any country any location any ip any isp etc with firewall.
• Change a default ssh port to another also we will set it to key based authentication so who have the key they can access.

IP addresses

On the main server, either local IP or private IP range with DHCP is used. Unless specific concerns arise, we plan to use 2 IPv4 addresses. We are also open to explore IPv6. If we use About ipv4 addresses, we need 5 ips: one for main server, two for gateway, three for any vps or container and four for wordpress vps, and 5 for anyother we need in future.

Application layer

We would like to start with Wordpress. Then, we add MediaWiki, Moodle and the rest. Our main server and its WordPress instances were hacked a few times. This is a description of what happened with the server (it is in Russian though) -- https://pravka.bskol.com/ru/%D0%9E%D0%BF%D1%8B%D1%82%D0%BD%D1%8B_%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82

WordPress

• WordPress -- VM or container model? we can use kvm based vms as well, but normally containers will be ok. we can use one vps for wordpress also.
• What would we do for its security? For securety we can use antivirus + CSF firewall

App HA

In addition to the bare-server, we plan to deploy one VPS in the US to extend the high-availability of its core applications. We cannot consider Cloudflare for the project because this would limit hands-on training opportunities for future students.

Learning content

Content source

When the server and applications are in place, to copy the Russian-language contents from the main applications.

Interpretation

To interpret the Russian content into Urdu.