[volunteers] Welcome to Anne Carasik

[Rick Moen]

FYI.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2010 14:37:02 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: stripes <stripes at tigerlair.com>
Subject: Re: [svlug-announce] SVLUG July 7th meeting: Not Your Father's
	Assembly Language
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting stripes (stripes at tigerlair.com):

> Hmm, not that I saw. I saw my email to the list bounced, and I didn't
> get a response. Not that it's your fault--email sucks :)

Eh, not sure.   You should have gotten two mails (back then, at the
beginning of June).  The first was an immediate automatic notice saying
that svlug-announce is a moderated mailing list, and that your post had
been held for moderation.

The second one was the manually written reject message from me, which
politely explained that (as with this month) I'd been out of town until
just before the June 2nd meeting, that nobody else at SVLUG had stepped
up to the plate to get the announcement out, and so I had gotten to that
task when I was available.

I mention this just for clarity, and because it's possible you might
have assumed the second message was autogenerated and not read the 
body text.  E.g.:

> Sure, lemme know what I need to do. I can't post to it.. my last reply
> to you was rejected. If you want, I can setup an alarm to send out the
> email a week in advance. Not a problem at all.

The thing is, you _can_ post to it to the exact same degree everyone
else can including me.  That is, it's a moderated list for me, too.

Last night, when I sent the message to svlug-announce, *I* immediately got
back an autogenerated message saying that svlug-announce is a moderated
mailing list, and that my post had been held for moderation.   That
would have been the exact same notice you got in June.

Then, I donned my listadmin 'hat' and visited the Mailman administrative
Web pages using the listadmin password, and clicked a radio button to
approve my posting in the held queue.

You or anyone else can always, always do the first part of that.  If you
join me and Mark Weisler on the listadmin team, you can also do the
second bit, though it's not necessary as either of Mark or I are
generally pretty quick on approving held non-spam postings to our two
moderated mailing lists (svlug-announce and jobs), just as we are 
quick to answer held non-spam postings from non-subscribed addresses to
the other mailing lists.

> Ok, what else do you need help with?

Roles:

1.  Sender of monthly meeting announcements.
2.  Maintainer of Web pages on www.svlug.org.
3.  Person who performs backups of our two machines.  (Currently none.)
4.  General sysadmin/troubleshooter of our two machines.  Currently
    mostly me, Mark Weisler, Lisa Corsetti when she has time.  Several
    other people have shell on each machine, but to my knowledge don't
    use them.
5.  Person who lines up speakers/topics for monthly meetings.
    (Currently nobody specific, though several people pitch in.)
6.  Person building replacement for the aging and at-risk lists.svlug.org
    machine.  This is a long discussion, which I'll defer for the moment.
7.  Person willing to run a monthly installfest, which would typically
    be on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.  Nobody is filling this
    role, which is one reason there are currently no installfests.
    The other is that a replacement venue must be nailed down.  
    There have been two or three recent credible suggestions.
8.  President.  (Currently vacant.)
9   Vice-president.  (Currently vacant.)
10. Emcee at the general meetings.  I'm honestly not sure if anyone has
    picked up this ball.
11. Person who keeps SVLUG's wireless WAP, brings it to the monthly 
    general meetings, and operates it.  This was Darlene Wallach, but 
    she handed it off to someone.  Bruce Coston?  
12. Listadmin.  This mostly involves the 'jobs' mailing list, 
    though at long intervals our contentious membership find new
    ways to create problems.  Each mailing list has a tiny set of 
    rules on its listinfo page, which are enforced impartially.
    http://www.svlug.org/policies/list-policy.php (link "Email Lists"
    on the site navbar) gives general info:  Essentially, we got 
    rid of all the high-context social control rubbish from several
    prior SVLUG administrations, act only on the basis of (the very few)
    documented rules, and do so in public (cc'd to the 'volunteers' 
    list you'll see mentioned below).

Note:  I do not wish to run SVLUG; I wish it to prosper and function,
which is why I do a number of the 'keep it running' things.  I am
already head of a LUG.  I don't wish to run two of them.

I've listed all the volunteer roles I can think of for completeness's
sake, not to overwhelm you.  Suggest trying one or two that appeal,
and then deciding which others if any.  I'll return to this point at the
end of my message.



It's great if you want to join the listadmin team.  I'll need a way to
convey the listadmin password to you out-of-band.  That means via either
telephone (I'm 650-283-7902) or via encrypted e-mail if you have a
GPG/PGP key.  (If you want it mailed, and can deal with
GPG/PGP-encrypted e-mail, I'll need your public key, please.)

All Mailman 'to the attention of the admin' notices from SVLUG's Mailman
software go to a single Mailman mailing list, which is publicly readable
but unadvertised for antispam reasons.  You should join that mailing
list in order to get the notices.  I'm going to put a space into the
relevant URL so that spambots don't follow it:

http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/ mailman-owner

So, please join mailing list 'mailman-owner' if you wish to be on the
listadmin team.



Let's start at the beginning.  http://www.svlug.org/ has "About Us" on
the navbar.  The resulting http://www.svlug.org/about.php page includes
"SVLUG Projects".  That page has a link to "Volunteer/Team Instructions
-- SVLUG Web Team".  Thus you arrive at:

http://www.svlug.org/teams/web-team.php


That page covers what is required to do maintenance of SVLUG's regular
Web pages.  If anything's _not_ covered there, we need to know so we can
fix that page.  (However, see also 'site-docs', below.)

That page tells you about our www.svlug.org machine, which is a virthost
at Linode running Ubuntu Server (Lighttpd, PHP, NSD, svn, sshd).  And
yes, you now have a "stripes" login on that machine.  Again, I need to
get you _that_ password out of band, too.

The Linode virthost is significantly resource-limited, which dictated
choice of RAM-thrifty software and is why SVLUG cannot within reason put
all its operations there.  Used to be 64 MB total RAM, 3 GB disk.  Now,
a little better:

root at gruyere:~/site-docs# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers   cached
Mem:        262368     256896       5472          0      37684   175792
-/+ buffers/cache:      43420     218948
Swap:       262136         12     262124
root at gruyere:~/site-docs# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda             7.7G  1.5G  6.2G  20% /
varrun                129M   52K  129M   1% /var/run
varlock               129M     0  129M   0% /var/lock
udev                  129M   12K  129M   1% /dev
devshm                129M     0  129M   0% /dev/shm
root at gruyere:~/site-docs# 


Your homedir contains by default two symlinks, put there by the adduser
script to help you find things.

root at gruyere:~# ls -l ~stripes
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stripes stripes 14 Jul  7 15:46 site-docs -> /srv/site-docs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stripes stripes 20 Jul  7 15:46 www -> /srv/www/svlug-main/


Please read http://www.svlug.org/teams/web-team.php to get the rest of
details about site maintenance.  I'm hoping you're interested in helping
with that site, though it's an assumption.

You will also need to read a limited amount of material in site-docs.  
As it says there, site-docs should contain _only_ materials that are
'security-sensitive or otherwise private'.  As it also says there, at
least one particularly security-sensitive datum is recorded in /root.


The second of two SVLUG machines is physical box lists.svlug.org, which
is hosted at Via.net in Palo Alto.  Again, you can read about that in
site-docs on www.svlug.org .  That is where our Mailman mailing lists
run, and where all our e-mail is handled (mailman, exim4, spamd, sshd,
Apache httpd).  Mailman's automatically generated Web pages are
generated from there via Apache httpd, but no other Web pages.

I have not yet created a 'stripes' shell account on lists.svlug.org.
I can if you need one for any reason, but normal Mailman administration 
doesn't require it.


Much of our collective knowledge and our volunteer business goes to two
low-traffic mailing lists, which you should please join:

http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/volunteers
http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/web-team

'web-team' has extremely low traffic, and was the original working list
for Web site work.  'volunteers' was part of a poorly thought out
redesign during the Reed/Ward administration, but we've kept it.
Several other working mailing lists were completely destroyed at that
time.  After Reed and Ward went away, I partially resurrected the most
worthwhile of them in archival (non-postable) form so the information in
it would not be totally lost.

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

http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/volunteers-old contains all of the
'volunteers' posts during the Reed/Ward period.  Starting a new archive
was the only practical way to convert the mailing list to public
archiving, which control freaks Reed/Ward refused to permit during their
administration.  To honour the implied commitment to posters of that
day, volunteers-old carries forward Reed/Ward's policy that archived
postings are available if you subscribe, but are not otherwise public.

You might wish to browse selected postings in 'volunteers' and
'web-team' first, most recent first.

(I am going to send a copy of this e-mail to 'volunteers'.)


I also have an out-of-band method for SVLUG core volunteers to
communicate in the event of problems with SVLUG's own mailing lists.
It's run by Mailman on my server.  This was set up as a
private mailing list, and as a technically non-SVLUG forum (though
anyone interested in assisting SVLUG's internal processes is welcome),
during the disasterous Reiber administration, when the core volunteers
correctly anticipated that they'd have to rebuild whatever remained of
SVLUG when Reiber left office.

I will have that mailing list send you an 'invite' notice.




Of the 12 roles I listed about, only a few are vital.  Speakers and
topics need to be found.  Currently, we're running low-ish, again.

Meeting announcements need to go out.  The mailing lists need to work,
which thankfully is pretty automatic these days, though we're only a
hard drive failure away from big problems.  And the Web pages need to
get maintained monthly as described in
http://www.svlug.org/teams/web-team.php .  And the listadmins must
process the Mailman admin queue, and once or twice a year rein in a
subscribed member who's disobeying our posted mailing list rules.
(Usually, these are just people who want to pick a fight with the
listadmins.  Rather sadistically, I don't play that game and have never
yet needed to moderate or eject a member.)


The rest of those 12 items are less vital or can be done without in the
short term.  (Consistent scheduled backups would make me happy.)


----- End forwarded message -----