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Digital Copyright Canada

FLORA Community WEB Server Information and Projects

• Server Project Documentation
• Specifics of the FLORA Web server including statistics.

FLORA Community WEB Server Project.

• (archived) Comnet-www discussion group is for general Community Networking, focusing on OSS/Free software communications tools.
• (archived) admin-design discussion group is for the discussion/design of FLORA.ORG specific services.
• (Moved to flora.ca) server status archive has reports of various changes being made to the FLORA Community Consulting servers.

This site is a work in progress to link volunteers from the Ottawa online community with a project that can help their community. A large part of the mission of FLORA is to demonstrate, document, or develop technology that can be used to more effectively communicate within a community.

The intention is to make all the services of FLORA able to be replicated on any other server. To this end I have started to make available many of the packages that FLORA makes use of. The server start with a stock Fedora Core Linux server.

• Webserver: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
• OS: Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
• Kernel: 2.6.21.7-5.fc8xen
• SQL Database: mysql-5.0.45-6.fc8
• PHP: php-5.2.6-2.fc8 .
• We do not support JServ(Java on the server), FrontPage(ASP/VBScript), ColdFusion or other proprietary vendor specific languages. There are, however, conversion tools available such as asp2php (VBScript to PHP) which may help. More information on PHP can be found in the Help for Web Managers. PHP scripts are also run in Safe-Mode.

• www.flora.org HTTP server statistics
• www.flora.org error logs (To find broken links/etc)
• Relevant Discussion Groups:
  • Comnet-www discussion group.
  • Server Status - Moderated group indicating server maintenance issues.
  • FLORA Helpdesk

• Current FLORA HARDWARE.
• More detailed PHP information
• PERL Modules installed

CommuterChallenge

Each year there is a Commuter Challenge. In the past Auto-Free Ottawa managed the software used to keep track of participants. We opened up a SourceForge project for a package called Commuter Challenge: GNU Potato Caboose.

Email

FLORA currently uses the University of Washington IMAPD (Often just an upgraded version from the one distributed with RedHat) and a version of Sendmail compiled with HESIOD support. On new systems, Sendmail only needs to be recompiled in an environment that includes libhesiod and to use an updated MC Makefile, while older versions required changing the makefile. (Old Documentation: MailDomain project, Common Email addressing project, MailBox project)

User authentication

While we were previously working on a custom Login Domain system, we are currently using standard Linux-PAM system. In the future we plan to move to LDAP

Multi-medium discussion groups

Much work is happening in this area. Main existing components are:

• Rich Site Summaries: We have only recently started to use them, but distribution of 'whats new' links will become more common. The hope is to create a 'my.flora.org' which would support per-user customizable RSS Syndication and Aggregation of activist sites.
• Mailing List: We currently use Majordomo for mailing lists.
• Mail To News gateway: We currently use Newsgate from ISC.
• Web-base Newsreader: The tool used for ott.* newsgroup reading is a very hacked up CGI/PERL system which causes a heavy load on the server (Each request spawns a copy of PERL and then a copy of nnrpd).
• PHP/SQL based forumdb is used for most FLORA discussion groups and is much faster than the NEWS based archives. There is a SourceForge Project that contains more information.
• Web-based List archives: We use MHonArc for many groups that do not also gate to a newsgroup.

Some old ideas and discussions are still online:

• Ottawa Discussion Groups project
• Floral Arrangement: Discussion group technology on FLORA
• Floral Arrangement version 2: Towards a community/activist portal.

WEB Publishing

Apache is used as the Webserver (Version details above), and maintenance is done through FTP (Supported by any FTP client, as well as many of the 1-step-publishing methods). We use the guest service of wu_ftpd which does a chroot() into the users home directory and does not allow them to read/modify other files on the disk.

Please read the FLORA.org Terms and Conditions before you submit information to FLORA.org
Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign (USA) (Canada)	FLORA Community Web (FLORA.ORG) is sponsored by FLORA Community Consulting (FLORA.CA).