FeministWiki:Technical documentation

Revision as of 13:37, 9 September 2018 by SocJusWiz (talk | contribs) (→‎Certs)

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/etc/domains contains all the FQDNs used by the FeministWiki, one per line. 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/etc/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  # Assuming Apache is running on the machine
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/etc/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)