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.

Local name service

apt-get install maradns

A lightweight caching name server listens on address 127.0.0.53. It queries customer name servers belonging to got.net and Godmama's Forge. It's mentioned first in our resolver configuration file /etc/resolv.conf which is obliquely mentioned (as "files") in /etc/nsswitch.conf

egrep -v '^#|^$' /etc/maradns/mararc

A local caching name server, also known as a "DNS forwarder", means you don't have to use the network for most name queries. For an email server that's looking up sender's PTR records, it's a real speed-up.

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: Postfix and Mailman

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.

Mailman generates two files /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases and /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db which are nentioned in /etc/postfix/main.cf. That's where the aliases for Mailman posting and admin functions are.

There's a popular script for further integration between Postfix and Mailman. Debian distributes it with Mailman but we're not using it. It makes Postfix depend on Python. The main advantage would be pre-queue rejection of rejectable messages, reducing backscatter and administrative noise.

Drupal and carve-outs

Most of the www.cagreens.org site is on Drupal, installed by the mbrennan user in /w/d7 Sept. 2011. Margot Brennan is a principal of the Radical Designs web design shop. Many directories and individual files are "carved out" of the www.cagreens.org virtual web server. These "carve-outs" are listed as Alias directives in the file /etc/sites-available/d7.cagreens.org. They refer to files on the pre-Drupal web site, in /w/cal/. That site appears intact at http://files.cagreens.org.

CiviCRM

A demonstration instance of CiviCRM was installed in March 2011. This instance was abandoned because its only user prefers commercial service bureaus.