Goals

Currently, all our Internet services (email, web, mailing lists, shell accounts) run on 2 AIX systems. (AIX is IBM's version of UNIX.) Michelob is running AIX 4.3; it runs email and mailing lists. Dark was recently upgraded to AIX 5.1; it runs the SLUUG.org web site. These systems are rather old and slow, running at around 100 MHz, with 64 MB / 1 GB RAM and 4 GB / 12 GB disk space. They have also had some hardware problems recently.

We want to move a portion of our current Internet functionality to more modern systems, to allow more people to share in the work, as there are more people familiar with Linux than AIX. We'll also be able to do things that we hadn't be able to before, due to older software. SpamAssassin and PHP are 2 of the major things we want to start using. (Mike Knight recently updated to the latest Perl on the AIX boxes, and was able to get SpamAssassin to work on it. However, we've still got the reliability and unfamiliarity issues.)

One of my (Craig's) personal goals is to move management of web content to a through-the-web content management interface. This would allow more people to have easier access to update our web site. The ideal package would have the following features:

• Looks like a "normal" web site, with mostly static content
• Editing a page is moderately easy, using wiki-like syntax or a WYSIWYG
• Accounts/ACLs limit who can edit pages, on a per-directory basis
• URLs look like URLs of a "normal" web site
• Should use modern standards and practices, such as XHTML and CSS
• Expandable, so we can add non-static pages later

The current systems will remain in some capacities. (At the very least, they will have shell access to play around with AIX.) Functionality will be migrated piece-by-piece, and no piece will be moved until it is ready.