Introduce a new developer to Organic Design

Introduce a new developer to Organic Design Organic Design procedure

Organic Design Servers & Packages

All our servers are installed with the install a new server procedure which starts with the installation of the organicdesign-server package and then takes you through configuration of Apache/PHP/MySQL and our Wikia structure. After that a number of other more specific procedures can be carried out which are described below.

The organicdesign-server package is in our packages.organicdesign.co.nz/main repository along with the organicdesign-workstation package which is used to install workstations to be used by members running our organisational system. To update tehse packages, see the Create or Update a Debian package procedure.

Later we like to be able to maintain our own tree of distro's all based on the server and workstation packages which are preloaded with our own software and content and exhibit a simple setup procedure to create the initial configuration structure.

Organic Design Procedures

The most important set of procedures is the sysop procedures, and out of these the most key ones are:

• Configure mail server - Exim4 MTA with Spamassassin, Dovecot IMAP server and Roundcube webmail
• Configure LAN - DHCP server and firewall for LAN based servers
• Configure DNS - LAN/Server based DNS and dynamic DNS solutions
• Configure SMB - Samba file shares
• Configure VPN - Remote access to file shares and other LAN resources
• Configure IRC - Run a chat channel, your bot can publish notifications to the channel
• Configure SVN - Set up Subversion repositories, web-svn and client svn access

Organic Design Code

Our Subversion repos at svn.organicdesign.co.nz contain all our code, only the extensions and tools repo's are active. The extensions repo contains all the MediaWiki extensions we maintain which are not popular enough to be in the official MediaWiki repo. See the configure SVN procedure for details about our Subversion setup and how to access it. The tools repo contains all our server tools and robot framework mainly written in Perl. Here's a quick run down of the important scripts and files:

• add-db - a script for adding a new MediaWiki database to MySQL from a template database dump
• dovecot-cert.sh - create/update the self-signed cert for the local Dovecot installation
• jobs - specialised jobs can be created which run in the background
• firewall.sh - template for a basic firewall for LAN-based servers
• wiki.pl - our script for interacting with MediaWiki's via HTTP
• wikid.pl - our main robot/daemon script, see wiki daemon for more detail
• wikid.conf.sample - sample configuration file for Wikia/robot framework

Useful links about Organic Design in general

• Organic Ontology - trees, mindmaps and diagrams showing all the aspects of OD
• Manifesto - our goals and philosophy
• Screencast example of RecordAdmin usage