Introduce a new sysop to Organic Design
Introduce a new sysop to Organic Design Organic Design procedure |
There are two aspects to the systems administrator role, Support and Procedural.
The support aspect means being on-call during work hours to handle various issues that can crop up such as:
- error messages when connecting to various services
- files required from backups
- checking logs
- queries over phone and email
The procedural aspect involves general server admin such as checking on space, bandwidth use and logs, keeping the OS's and installed packages up to date. Most of the tasks will involve following procedures, of which the most important are listed below. The candidate requires good familiarity with the Linux shell, configuration and logs.
Contents
Wiki/Wikia configuration
Most of the settings required are already configured in the wikia.php script in out extensions' svn repo, but some settings such as the wiki's name, its database details and its extensions are still necessary. See our sample file LocalSettings.sample.php which covers most of the common conventions for a wiki intended for Organic Design wiki organisation use. One other related file is wikia.i18n.php which contains all the internationalised messages used by OD wiki organisational systems. See the install a new wiki for more detail.
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:
- Install a new organisational system - Starting from scratch with a new project or business
- Install a new server - Sets up the core IT infrastructure
- Install a new wiki - Get the Wiki Organisation interface and robot-framework running
- 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
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