GrapheneOSMar 3
We recently asked for additional sponsored 10Gbps dedicated servers in Europe. We received over a dozen offers and are still looking into and following those up. So far, we've received a 10Gbps update server from Zare in London and a 20Gbps one in Amsterdam from Cherry Servers.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3

We now have a total of 5 sponsored update servers:

20Gbps from Cherry Servers in Amsterdam
10Gbps from Zare in London
10Gbps from Xenyth in Toronto
10Gbps from ReliableSite in Miami
10Gbps from ReliableSite in Los Angeles

Cherry Servers also provided a 2nd server for geocoding.

Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
We have a full list of our public-facing servers at https://grapheneos.org/articles/grapheneos-servers including details on the sponsored servers with links to the websites of the sponsors. All the update servers are sponsored since paying for the amount of traffic we'll be using would be very expensive.
GrapheneOS servers

Documentation on GrapheneOS servers.

GrapheneOS
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3

In addition to the primary purpose of updates, we use these servers as a subset of our 11 locations for website/network services.

We moved our mail server to a system container on the Xenyth server where we're using our own AS and IP space via BGP to avoid spam filtering issues.

Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
We're also going to be using a subset of these as additional ns2 anycast DNS locations. We already use the Xenyth server as 1 of our 9 ns2 locations and plan to use the Zare server for it soon too. This depends on BGP support including BGP communities for traffic engineering.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
Cherry Servers also provided a 2nd sponsor server in Amsterdam for us to use as our first geocoding server via Nominatim. Nominatim is very demanding and calls for at least around 128GB of memory and 4TB fast NVMe storage. The initial data import for Nominatim took almost 2 days.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
Geocoding means converting the description of a location such as an address or the name of a place to coordinates. It supports many different kinds of searches such as finding a pharmacy or park within a certain zone. There's also reverse search to convert coordinates to names.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
We provide geocoding as an opt-in service with a choice between our proxy to the OpenStreetMaps Nominatim server (recommended) or directly using their service. Our proxy will soon be pointed at the server from Cherry Servers and then replaced with a new multi-server GeoDNS setup.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
You can try out our new self-hosted geocoding server at https://ams.nominatim.grapheneos.org/ui/search.html. In addition to OpenStreetMaps data, we've imported the primary/secondary Wikipedia importance data, US/UK postcodes, US house data and OSM special phrases. It should be close to the OSM service now.
Nominatim Demo

Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
We provide our own implementation of both network-based location and geocoding in GrapheneOS. Network-based location is implemented with on-device positioning but still depends on a service to obtain location data for nearby networks. We're going to be self-hosting both services.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3

Settings > Location > Location services provides these settings.

Our added "Geocoder" setting provides a choice of using the GrapheneOS proxy or directly using the OpenStreetMaps service. It will soon change to choosing between our self-hosted service and the OpenStreetMaps one.

Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
Our added "Network location" setting provides a choice between using the GrapheneOS proxy to Apple, Apple or Apple China. We're going to build our own cell tower and Wi-Fi location databases to provide our own non-proxy network location option including full offline support.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
For network-based location, enabling "Wi-Fi scanning" is recommended since otherwise it has to fall back to only using cell towers when Wi-Fi is disabled and can't function if cellular is disabled. Wi-Fi scanning changes the meaning of the Wi-Fi toggle to allow scans when off.
Show threadBaffling7384
@GrapheneOS Is WiFi scanning happening when WiFi is off and Location is on or when both are off?
Mar 3 at 5:18pmWeb
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3

@Baffling7384 Apps require the Location permission to perform Wi-Fi scans so disabling the global Location toggle will avoid Wi-Fi scans. Apps including our Network Location app cannot perform Wi-Fi scans if Location is toggled off globally or if they don't have the Location permission in the first place. Network Location also won't be actively doing anything if Location is disabled since there won't be requests to it.

Wi-Fi scanning toggle only determines if Wi-Fi being off prevents scanning.

Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3
@Baffling7384 Wi-Fi scanning toggle has no impact on whether Wi-Fi scans can be done when Wi-Fi is enabled, only whether Wi-Fi being disabled prevents doing scans. An app with the Location permission granted by the user can do Wi-Fi scans, but it can't do that while Wi-Fi is actually off since it would be unavailable. Wi-Fi scanning just changes the meaning of Wi-Fi being off to meaning it won't use any of the functionality for associating with networks but can still support scans.
Show threadP357Mar 3
@GrapheneOS @Baffling7384
So whether Bluetooth scanning is enabled or not is irrelevant if Bluetooth is enabled globally all the time?
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 3

@p357 @Baffling7384 The Bluetooth scanning toggle works the same way as Wi-Fi scanning. Neither makes any difference while they're enabling.

Our network location implementation is currently primarily based on Wi-Fi APs with fallback to cell towers if there aren't enough known Wi-Fi APs around for more precise positioning based on those. It doesn't use Bluetooth beacons at all right now since it's not usually very useful so we didn't bother implementing support for it for the time being.