Richard,
We use Discourse (as a user) to get support for the Mail in a Box
system. MIAB use Discourse for their support systems. I also think
Discourse is used for the Ionic support pages as well as they have very
similar looking interfaces. Until now I paid little attention to them.
I was going to say that I wasn't too impressed with it as a system, then
I thought again and realised that it actually works pretty well and
doesn't get in your way too much. That's a pretty good compliment as the
software isn't in your face all the time telling you how nice it is,
anybody used Slack recently :) We use it quite a lot and in hindsight it
works well.
We've never spun a Discourse system up, but I have some spare time this
evening and might just put one on a VMWare ESXI server and see how it
looks.
I may be older than Dr Hipp as I can recall running Unix on a 64KB (yep
KB) box in the 80's, so am very familiar with maximising resources, but
I go the other way now and and run dedicated (but small and self
contained) boxes that are very focused and don't try to cram as much
into a single box/instance/VM as possible. I don't care about the fact
I'm running 30 small Linux boxes on my single ESXI server as I can spin
them up and most of the time they don't do anything.
I accept the issues over maintenance though, but I have a standard set
of instructions I follow to harden the boxes and restrict logins with
things like fail2ban. From start to finish I can have a hardened Ubuntu
box up in around 20-30 minutes. Very happy to share these instructions
as somebody may say they are rubbish and can provide better hardening
instructions.
I'm UK based, but happy to help, setting this sort of stuff up is
something I can do and have regularly done (but NOT for Discourse),
anyway I'm better at this than SQL :)
It's currently 20:30 UK time, can help, other people have helped me
enough on this forum, so I feel I can contribute something back.
Thoughts on what needs to be done:
1. Setup the VMware instance correctly based on the Discourse info.
2. Provide some sort of access via ssh, passwords or whatever.
3. Details of IP addresses.
4. Firewall configure, Its not clear if these VM's are behind other
firewalls and what the access rights are, e.g. you have https.
5. What's the SSL situation. We've just moved from RapidSSL to
LetsEncrypt as a) They are free b) They self renew c) They weren't going
to be blacklisted by Google as they were really Symantec certificates.
6. Does the installation need root access?
7. Postfix information, e.g. is it a satellite, a relay etc etc. One
wrong move here and we get the IP address and domain name banned. Did
that for our domain whilst setting up MIAB.
8. Installation of Discourse.
9. How do multiple people work together on the same box? Slack? Skype?
Shouting loudly
10. Documenting the build?
11. How to test the build? Testers needed and a test plan needs to be
put together. SQLite has an excellent reputation, this shouldn't sully
it.
12. Profit?
Just my 2p worth,
Rob
On 13 Jun 2018, at 19:59, Richard Hipp wrote:
Cross-posted to the fossil-users mailing list since www.fossil-scm.org
and www.sqlite.org are the same machine and both mailing lists are
impacted by the current problem.
On 6/13/18, Luiz Américo <brandk...@gmail.com> wrote:
How about using https://www.discourse.org/ ?
Open source projects can use for free
Thanks for the pointer, Luiz.
Discourse is moving the right direction, I think. To install it, one
downloads a docker container and runs it on some Linux VM someplace.
(They recommend Digital Ocean, which is where I www3.sqlite.org is
hosted already.) It's a self-contained package with minimal
dependencies that just works. And it uses SQLite! My kind of
software!
Here are my remaining points of heartburn with Discourse:
(1) The installation guide recommends using an external email service,
and they even recommend four appropriate services. I clicked through
to each one, having never heard of any of them before. All four are
pushing email marketing for companies sending 10 million or more
emails per month. It seems to me that aggressive email marketing is
the root cause of my problem in the first place, so I am somewhat
reluctant to engage a marketing firm to help with the solution.
Fortunately, Discourse also allows one to use a self-hosting Postfix
installation, which is what we are currently running on sqlite.org.
(2) Discourse seems to want to run on a machine all by itself. (It is
written in Rails and has its own webserver.) I suppose I could spin
up yet another VM to do that. But I learned this craft in an age
where machines were big and expensive and the goal was to cram as many
services as you could fit onto a single machine and IP address, and so
spinning up a separate machine with its own domain name just to manage
the mailing list seems wasteful, somehow. And, that means there is
one more machine that I have to keep track of and manage and defend
from attacks, etc.
(Possible remedy to 2): The main SQLite server (www.sqlite.org)
actually owns 3 IP addresses, only 2 of which are currently in use. I
suppose I could run Discourse on that 3rd unused IP address. But that
will end up being a non-standard setup....
(3) The installation guide says that Discourse takes between 2 and 8
minutes to boot up. Seriously?
Even so, Discourse does seem like considering. Does anybody else have
any experience with Discourse, good or bad?
Are there any volunteers willing to call me on skype and help set this
up?
--
D. Richard Hipp
d...@sqlite.org
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