[Admin] Xemacs needs on the new box

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 30 22:39:15 EDT 2008


David Lesher writes:

 > I've never been clear on what Xemacs uses/needs on their side of
 > the box.

XEmacs currently uses the following Tux services.  On which box they
are going to reside in the future I don't know, so I'm just going to
list them all, with the box where we *currently* access them in parens.

1.  Several XEmacs developers have unprivileged user shell accounts.
    These have always been treated as "property" of the individual,
    based on an introduction via XEmacs, though.  I don't know what
    others use them for.  (gwyn)

2.  An xemacadm group for the XEmacs developers. (gwyn)

3.  An xemacweb shell account for the httpd and for shell access by
    the webmaster.  This is also currently used by our Mailman setup.
    (gwyn)

4.  Distributions (accessible through FTP and maybe HTTP) and website
    static pages (HTTP).  We've discussed a wiki but never done
    anything about it.  Distributions are uploaded via shell accounts
    of the release engineers (currently myself, Vin Shelton, and
    Norbert Koch).  The website configuration (search etc) is done
    using shell access, the content is automatically updated via ssh
    to xemacweb triggering a CVS update and site rebuild from a commit
    hook script in our CVS repository at dotsrc.org.

5.  Primary DNS for the xemacs.org domain.  This is updated by shell
    on gwyn plus a restricted sudo for a couple of hostmasters (me and
    Adrian, I think) to reload BIND. (gwyn)  Secondaries are provided
    outside of Tux by dotsrc.org and somebody else.  It is proposed to
    move to the stealth master + multiple Tux nameservers model that
    tux.org domain uses.

6.  Mail forwarding via virtusertable for XEmacs developers. (gwyn)
    Maintenance of the virtusertable and MTA aliases table are done by
    shell, with a couple of postmasters having restricted sudo access
    to run newaliases and make -f /etc/mail/Makefile.

7.  Mailman mailing lists.  (gwyn, calypso) gwyn is the primary MX for
    xemacs.org.  Mail sent to LIST at xemacs.org gets an identifying
    header inserted, then is delivered to xemacweb at gwyn, which
    processes it with procmail, and forwards anything not determined
    to be spam to LIST at calypso, where it is processed normally by
    Mailman.  I'd like to clean this up, but the last time I checked
    we really needed some of our own recipes, and the powers that were
    didn't allow us to write our own SpamAssassin rules.  (Could have
    run a separate instance of SA but that seemed too wasteful.)  I
    have pretty broad sudo authorization on calypso I think, but I've
    only ever used it to restart Mailman and access some private
    archives we have, so I'm not exactly sure how far it extends.

Other services that have been proposed but never followed up are a
wiki, read-only mirrors of our source repos, and an issue tracker.

 > Do we need to have a separate Linux vm for you? How much of your
 > CPU and storage space is straight archive serving vs. interactive?

Currently all of our public services from gwyn are static.  However,
I'd like to provide more dynamic content as described above.



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