[volunteers] mailman tweeks - future

[Alvin Oga]

hi ya svlug vol's

i thought i'd put stuff in the open of what i've got in
my little hijacking frying pan ...

first, i thought we'd let the volunteers ponder some thoughts
and direction, ideas, etc .. than post to the membership later
( say within the next few days )

secondly... i'd like to think we're doing/applying commonly accepted
"best practices" and use "common sense" methodology to maintain
and improve the current svlug server

	- there can be lots of discussions about what is best
	practice or common sense.. but hopefully, we can avoid that

third, as with paul reiber ( since we have 2 pauls ), if you have
some good ideas, i'm hoping we can get new folks to do the additional
new work to implement new ideas

	- more people means more paperwork and policys 
	so that everybody plays by the same rules of the game 

a) i've asked for mailman/exim help to tweek the svlug servers
   and surprisingly, there's not many that came forward .. *pout*
   but the "tasks" at hand must continue .. what fun .. :-)

b) i'd like to tweek the mailman/exim config to:

	- minimize spam .. since i'm getting tons of spam from volunteers

	- personally, i think all mailing list should be publicly
	visible unless that mailing list was initially defined as
	private ( why it needs to be private is a separate issue )
	since svlug is a community effort and everybody benefits

c) since some folks are privacy sensitive, those folks DEFINITELY
   take the time now to verify your "privacy flag" is set
   in your mailman settings

	- if you belong to mailing lists, you get these mailman
	reminders monthly

	- privacy we're discussing is, as viewed from the members/subscribers
	
	- i am NOT speaking of secrets being witheld from svlug members

	http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/svlug
	http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/volunteers

		- if you're like me and have forgotten your pwd 
		and deleted the mailman entries... i guess you're not
		worried about it...

		- if you are worried .. do email us ( volunteers )
		or privately for more info and we'll get "it" done

d) i've created rick's raid1 disks for svlug.org, and its currently
   up and running, however, my next hoop is to install apache-1.3.x
   and configure it

	- raid stuff is trivial and fun, when it works right
	as it did for this pass .. worked the first time
	for those of you contemplating raid1 with debian-testing installer

	- you do need to know some basics, "fd", selecting raid1, etc
	- you do need to know lilo's config file syntax for raid1

e) i'll be running rsync from www.svlug.org to new.svlug.org
   and anybody else that wants to mirror svlug is welcome to do so
   as long as "privacy" and root privilege rules are followed

	- the new svlug machine when ready will be out of my office
	so that i'll be less paranoid about "everything"
	and able to keep corp work stuff separate from svlug

f) i guess, as the hijacker of svlug.org, we'll entertain other changes
   that will benefit svlug.org for the next few ( 5 ) years...

	- at this point, the choise of distro is not an option
	unless you're willing to do the work yourself

	- we do NOT want to be building another svlug server if we do
	not need to do so

	- i have plenty of spare (old) PCs.. so hardware is not an issue

g) we'll continue cleaning up and hardening the old svlug server
   as needed  .. and if its broken, oh well .. we'll try to work around it

	- things being broken is my major paranoia that is a major
	security risk since it's "unknown" what can happen
	and is completely avoidable to get back to a "known" state

h) things do take time to get done ... so please do not expect it to
   be done overnight

==
== all changes we made are reversable back to the way it was
==

c ya
alvin