FeministWiki:Server setup

!!! WORK IN PROGRESS !!!

These are the steps required to set up a new FeministWiki Debian server.

Update & upgrade

First of all, let's make sure the system is up to date.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Install miscellaneous tools

Some of these are needed further down, some are just good to have.

apt-get install certbot
apt-get install dnsutils
apt-get install emacs
apt-get install git
apt-get install mg
apt-get install moreutils
apt-get install net-tools
apt-get install nmap
apt-get install software-properties-common
apt-get install tree

Set up firewall

For now, block everything but SSH.

apt-get install ufw
ufw allow proto tcp to 0.0.0.0/0 port 22
ufw enable

Install server components

We will now install all the software used for the various FeministWiki services. But first we might want to add some additional package repositories so we can use the latest version of some of the used software.

Backports:

echo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian $(lsb_release -sc)-backports main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list

PHP repo only if a very new version is needed:

wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sury-php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg
echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sury-php.list

MariaDB repo only if a very new version is needed:

wget https://mariadb.org/mariadb_release_signing_key.asc
apt-key add mariadb_release_signing_key.asc
rm mariadb_release_signing_key.asc
echo "deb http://mirror.23media.de/mariadb/repo/10.4/debian $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mariadb.list

Now we can install everything:

apt-get install apache2
apt-get install dovecot-core
apt-get install ejabberd # good candidate for backports
apt-get install fail2ban
apt-get install inspircd
apt-get install mailman
apt-get install mariadb-server
apt-get install opendkim
apt-get install php7.4 # or whatever version we're on
apt-get install postfix
apt-get install slapd

Example for installing ejabberd from backports instead:

apt-get install ejabberd/$(lsb_release -sc)-backports

Fetch scripts & config repo

Set up GitHub ssh access by copying the .ssh/id_rsa from the old server. After that:

cd ~
git clone git@github.com:FeministWiki/FeministWiki.git repo
cp -a repo/root/* .
openssl aes-256-cbc -d -md sha512 -pbkdf2 -iter 100000 -in repo/pwd.enc -out - | tar -xzf-

The openssl decryption command will prompt you for a password. Enter the password stored in /root/pwd/meta on the old server.

Put config files in place

The principle is simple: take all the config files from /root/repo/etc and put them where they belong in /etc. However, since a new server might mean much newer software, it's possible that some config files aren't compatible anymore, or that some new sensible defaults might be overwritten by the old config. Sadly figuring out these incompatibilities is a manual process (compare new default config with old config) and this guide cannot help you much.

There's one special thing to remember, which is that after copying in the new /etc/aliases file, you have to run the newaliases command for the changes to take effect.

Create vmail user

groupadd -g 5000 vmail
useradd -u 5000 -g vmail -s /usr/sbin/nologin -d /home/vmail -m vmail

Initialize LetsEncrypt

The first run of Certbot has to be interactive, so we will do that now. Since the DNS entries still point to the old server, we can't get a cert for the real domains. For now, make feministwiki.dev point to the IP address of the new server, then proceed with the commands below.

systemctl stop apache2
certbot certonly --cert-name feministwiki.org  # Yes, it should be .org and not .dev

Then follow the on-screen instructions of certbot. Use the "standalone" authentication method when asked, and enter feministwiki.dev as the sole domain.

Stop services on old server

At this point, all services on the old server should be stopped, because we will now begin to transfer all the actual data.

Copy over LDAP databases

TODO

Copy over SQL databases

The following command can be used to create a dump of all databases. You can use the show databases; command in the SQL console to make sure that the list of databases is complete. (Unfortunately they have to be listed manually, because using the --all-databases option includes system databases that we don't want.)

mysqldump -u root -p"$(cat /root/pwd/mysql)" > all-databases.sql \
  --databases blogs \
              feministblog \
              feministfiles \
              feministforum \
              feministmail \
              feministsocial \
              feministwiki \
              feministwiki_de \
              feministwiki_es \
              feministwiki_it \
              feministwiki_pt \
              fff

You can then copy over this file to the new server and execute it via:

mysql -u root -p"$(cat /root/pwd/mysql)" < all-databases.sql

Copy over /var/www

This is very simple but takes a lot of time to finish:

cd /var/www
tar -czf - . | ssh root@feministwiki.dev 'cd /var/www; tar -xzf -'

Open ports

We are finally ready to serve:

for port in 25 80 443 465 587 993 995 5222 5223 5269 5270 5443 6697 7777
do ufw allow proto tcp to 0.0.0.0/0 port $port
done

At this point you might want to do some testing with the feministwiki.dev domain.

Reboot

We could restart a lot of services manually, but it's easiest to just reboot.

reboot

Update DNS entries

You have to change the configuration of the following domains:

• feministwiki.org
• feministwiki.net
• feministwiki.de
• fem.wiki
• fffrauen.de

feministwiki.org

You only have to change three DNS entries, since most of the subdomains work via CNAME entries:

• The main A entry for @ (self-reference i.e. feministwiki.org)
• The A entry for smtp since this is not allowed to be a CNAME
• The A entry for xmpp since this is not allowed to be a CNAME

feministwiki.net, feministwiki.de, fem.wiki, fffrauen.de

For these, you only have to change the main A entry, since they don't use SMTP or XMPP.

Update the certificate

Run the letsencrypt-refresh script to get a new certificate which includes all our domain names, since we had started out with just feministwiki.dev.