ITSquad

ITSquad
Topics	Pirate Party
Start date	Sun 20 May 2012
Contact	it +@+ pirateparty.be or meet us at our Pirate Lab
Status	In progress

Description

The ITSquad takes care of the IT-infrastructure of the pirate party. Contact if you want to do an IT-project, need an email address, have requests for a Crew, would like to add a feature to the site, etc.

We can also help with finding, and sometimes providing, tools and services whose values are in line with the values of the Pirateparty. Take a look on our Pirates Selection page for more information.

Expenses

Networking4All (registrar)	54,75€	Yearly
parley.be	10,95€	Yearly
thepirateparty.be	10,95€	Yearly
depiratenpartij.be		Yearly
lepartipirate.be	10,95€	Yearly
diepiratenpartei.be		Yearly
piratenpartij.be	10,95€	Yearly
pirateparty.be	10,95€	Yearly
Infomaniak (hosting provider)
Mailboxes @pirateparty.be and old mailing lists @piratepary.be	120,00€	Yearly
Hetzner (hosting provider)	297,84€	Yearly
Mediawiki webserver since October 2019	3,01€	Monthly
Wordpress websites (en,fr,nl) since March 2020	3,01€	Monthly
Mastodon server since October 2019	6,9€	Monthly
Liège yunohost server since September 2018	3,01€	Monthly
parley yunohost server since November 2018	3,01€	Monthly
Storage box (500Go) since September 2019	5,88€	Monthly
TOTAL (if nothing changes)	494,49€	Yearly

Ressources

• the ITNow page for some kind of inventory of our «channels & tools».
• the Emails page for a list of emails +@+pirateparty.be.
• the Pirate Labs pad to work on different LABz projects.
• the Pirate Party Website pad for comments, remarks, todos...
• the Website Squad Loomio Group about website posts and content.
• the Pirates Selection, a brainstorming about IT tools that could be useful for pirates.
• the Hackathon, to work together on IT stuff during one long day.
• Pad dedicated for the ITSquad

Administration Docs

Ansible

To manage our servers in an automated way: https://dev.parley.be/PPBe/ansible-infra

Mastodon

To maintain a decentralized and libre social-network

See the Mastodon page

Parley

Parley is a place where we provide simple services open for everyone. All are free software.

Upgrading

Upgrading can be done from the admin interface or from the cli over ssh. Before updating applications, make a backup. Backups will be created automatically during upgrade, but if you do them manually, you can check that they haven't failed. When doing risky upgrades, please take a snapshot from the Hetzner admin console. An example of a risky upgrade is for migrations like Debian Stretch to Debian Buster.

Landing page

The landing page is a simple HTML page with css and javascript (but has graceful degradation for those who want to disable javascript). The files can be found on our git repo. Updates should be pushed to there. More information can be found in the README.md

The files for the webapp-application are stored on the Parley server in /var/www/my_webapp__2/. You can find a systemlink to the nginx configuration and to a daily cronjob file. The files of the site themselves are stored in the www folder. It uses git, so updating is cd /var/www/my_webapp__2/www; git pull.

There is also an sftp connection (but can probably be removed since updating happens using git and the nginx and cronjob files can't be changed through sftp).

You can update the website on the server and then git add <changed-files>; git commit; git push, or you can make the changes to the repo and then wait for the daily job to do it's work.

Jirafeau

When updating Jirafeau the config file gets overwritten. There's an issue, but it doesn't seem like something that will be fixed soon https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/jirafeau_ynh/issues/49 . Make sure you test before and after the upgrade if everything is still as it should be.

• Settings are stored in /var/www/jirafeau/lib/config.local.php. The settings from before the upgrade are stored in /var/www/jirafeau/lib/var/www/jirafeau/lib/config.original.php.
• The default time to keep a file is a week, the maximum is a month.
• The max uploadlimit is 2000MB (2GB)
• You can set an admin user. If you're the one who mostly maintains this, you can add yourself. It's the username for the user-interface (at time of writing and afaik, this is only one user max). Another option is to use a shared password and set that instead.

Also note that we've added a file /home/yunohost.app/jirafeau-filesystem as a filesystem so we can limit the total uploads (to 2.7 GiB). See https://blog.ilja.space/~/MyLearningCurve/limiting-total-size-of-uploads-in-jirafeau

When removing Jirafeau the filesystem should be removed manually, but don't forget to also change /etc/fstab otherwise the server may not boot anymore! (See the blogpost to know what was done so you can remove safely, best is to make a take a snapshot from the Hetzner admin console beforehand so it can be put back if something fails.)

Yunohost

We try to promote and use yunohost because it's a good server OS for self hosting. Crews who want to administer their own services can get a ynh server. We can provide the service to set everything up, teach some basics and provide support in case of trouble. An explanation on how and why can be found on this blogpost.

Setting up an instance

If a crewmember is interested in running their server from home, an option is an internet cube, but typically we'll use a vps. To set up a vps:

• See liege.pirateparty.be for an example
• At least one person of the crew will be admin and contact for us. Make sure we know who that is.
• Log in to Hetzner > cloud > Default > make a new server > install Debian and run the yunohost installer for Debian
• Run the post-install and add a subdomain to ynh and set up the DNS records. The easiest is to set A and AAAA records for the crew.pirateparty.be and a CNAME for *.crew.pirateparty.be. Make sure to set up the other DNS records as well (CAA, TXT...)
• Add reverse DNS: Log in to hetzner > cloud > Default > Choose correct server > Networking > Under Primary IPS you can see the reverse DNS. Set it for both ipv4 and ipv6
• Run the diagnostics from the admin interface and set everything up correctly

Things to know for the admin(s)

• Please keep the server updatet
• If there are problems, contact us via chat or mail. We're here to help, make use of it
• Keep an eye on resources
• There's a good chance that mails will be blacklisted by default by MS and Google. What you can do is "warm up" your domain. Send mails to people who use outlook and gmail accounts and make sure they reply. Or have them send to you. Basically, you want MS and Google to see 'healthy' traffic form your domain/ip.
• Total cost to ppbe is €X/month and ppbe pays for this. If people want to give some monetary support for it, they can donate to ppbe whatever amount they see fit (pay-what-you-want). It's also possible to donate to the yunohost project.
• Try to give a short tour of the admin and user interface, so they know what they can do and how

Todo

• Follow our latest discussions and work flow there on a Loomio thread.

Meetings

Meeting	Date	Venue
Mastodon migration to Glitch-soc	Sun 1 September 2019, 10:00am	Fred's place 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Yunohost : Let's decentralise the crews!	Sun 24 June 2018, 10:00am	tierce's place – 30 rue Achille Bauduin 1300 Limal
Make the PPBe GDPR-compliant	Sun 27 May 2018, 10:00am	tierce's place – 30 rue Achille Bauduin 1300 Limal
New website online meeting	Wed 25 April 2018, 9:00pm	Online
New website	Sat 21 April 2018, 2:00pm	Expression – Koning Albertplein 14 2800 Mechelen
Updating the web site/slogan: let us tell a story	Sat 9 December 2017, 2:00pm	Expression – Koning Albertplein 14 2800 Mechelen
Mastodon upgrade and Mails structure	Wed 1 November 2017, 10:00am	tierce's place – 30 rue Achille Bauduin 1300 Limal
IT Squad Meeting	Sun 13 August 2017, 12:00pm	tierce's place – 30 rue Achille Bauduin 1300 Limal
Mails Follow up	Sun 2 July 2017, 10:00am	tierce's place – 30 rue Achille Bauduin 1300 Limal
Setting up our Mail Infrastructure	Sun 4 June 2017, 10:00am	tierce's place – 30 rue Achille Bauduin 1300 Limal

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