FeministWiki:Technical documentation

This page documents the FeministWiki's technical infrastructure, the target audience being technicians.

Hosts

The following table documents the DNS configuration, and can be used as part of the /etc/hosts file on each server to obviate the need for DNS lookups when connecting to one another.

IP	FQDN	Host
85.214.101.34	feministwiki.org
85.214.101.34	www.feministwiki.org	www
85.214.101.34	ldap.feministwiki.org	ldap
85.214.101.34	chat.feministwiki.org	chat
85.214.101.34	forum.feministwiki.org	forum
85.214.101.34	mail.feministwiki.org	mail
85.214.101.34	files.feministwiki.org	files
85.214.101.34	imap.feministwiki.org	imap
85.214.101.34	smtp.feministwiki.org	smtp
85.214.101.34	xmpp.feministwiki.org	xmpp
85.214.101.34	irc.feministwiki.org	irc
85.214.101.34	social.feministwiki.org	social
85.214.101.34	add-member.feministwiki.org	add-member

(As you can see, all services are on the same server for now.)

Certs

The FeministWiki uses LetsEncrypt to acquire digital certificates for encrypted communication.

To ease use of the letsencrypt command, the file /root/domains contains all the FQDNs used by the FeministWiki, one per line. The final line of the file should not end in a newline character. Given that, the preferred way to populate the /etc/letsencrypt/live/feministwiki.org directory with fresh certs is to run the following command while TCP port 80 is free (e.g. stop Apache first):

letsencrypt certonly --authenticator standalone -d "$(tr '\n' ',' < /root/domains)"

Additionally, for programs that require a cert file and its private key in a single combined .pem file, run the following commands to generate such a file:

cd /etc/letsencrypt/live/feministwiki.org
cat fullchain.pem privkey.pem > certbundle.pem

The script /root/bin/letsencrypt-refresh does all of the above, so in practice you just need to run the following commands to recreate the cert:

service apache2 stop
letsencrypt-refresh
service apache2 start

The above can be used not only to refresh a cert that's running out, but also to add a new domain to the cert. Just add the domain to /root/domains and run the commands.

Note that the letsencrypt command doesn't work well on a "dumb" terminal such as an Emacs shell buffer. Make sure to run it from within a proper terminal emulator.

Services

This section documents the individual services of the FeministWiki. They should work regardless of what server they're on. I.e. every service could in theory be hosted on its own server.

Wiki (feministwiki.org, www.feministwiki.org)

Software: MediaWiki

(continue here)