IT/Benchfile

Benchfile

A "benchfile" is the book you leave in your desk drawer for your replacement in case you suddenly get a better job.

Provisioning

The Green Party of California rents a virtual private server (VPS) from Godmama's Forge. It's Ubuntu-9.0 ("Karmic Koala") based on Debian-5.0 ("Squeeze") plus some work-in-progress from Debian Unstable ("Sid"). The virtual host is named wangari.cagreens.org and runs under Vmware Enterprise.

LAMP Stack

apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork php5-pear php5-gd php5-cli libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server mysql-client

Backups

apt-get install rsync

Backup is a nightly rsync via ssh to a host in Cameron's garage. Authentication is by a key in ~root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

DNS block list

apt-get install rbldnsd

The blocklist file is /var/lib/rbldns/iparanges. It's maintained on another server, and pushed here by rsync via ssh. Configuration is in /etc/default/rbldnsd. This is one of two servers of the "dnsbl.cagreens.org" blocklist. At least four hosts refer to this DNSBL.

Email server

The "Debian Way" has Postfix' configuration files in /etc/postfix and the mapfiles they use in /etc/postfix/maps. Tradition has the email aliases file in /etc/, so we have a symlink there pointing at the real one.

apt-get install postfix postfix-pcre mailman

Mailman runs as the "list" user. GNU Mailman installs into its data directories and runs there. Debian installs the software in /usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman and /usr/lib/mailman/, with data files in /var/lib/mailman/. They've done a nice job of separating the files their package maintainer updates from those Mailman updates as it runs, so you can do

apt-get install mailman

when there's an update, without losing/breaking anything.