We've still got plenty of work to do before we can move the new system(s) into production.

(Enter any command-line programs you want to have installed here.)

Need to configure all regular users. (Actually, we need to determine if regular users will have accounts on these boxes at all. But the answer will probably be yes.) If we do allow normal users, we need to transfer over the same UIDs and (shadow) passwords as the existing boxes (Michelob and Dark) use.

Need to fix server not shutting down properly. It hangs before finishing the shutdown process. (I believe this is fixed. I rebooted the systems on 3/16/2006 using init 6 and they came back up just fine. – Craig)

Need to fix the console not coming back up after it blanks out. May be APM power settings. (Our current kernel doesn't support APM.)

We may need to open some more ports for new services, if we add any new services.

Outbound email seems to be working OK. Not anymore :( as of November 4, 2005. (CMB)

Inbound SMTP seems to be working OK, but the hand-off to Cyrus seems to be broken.

Jeff Muse and Craig Buchek think we should switch to Courier IMAP. Cyrus isn't working, and there's better documentation for setting up Courier in a configuration similar to ours.

Lots of testing (via the test.sluug.org domain) will be required before we're ready to send production email to the new system.

We need to figure out how users on the existing servers (Michelob and Dark) will be able to access their email without needing to make any major changes on those systems.

Make sure SSL is working properly, including (self-signed) certificates. (Probably include instructions to users on how to accept our certificate authority.)

Need to verify that all virtual sites are working.

Need to determine what web apps we plan to run, especially if any of them will control the root home page of a virtual site. Possible web apps include:

• Content Management System
• Wiki
• Calendar
• Webmail (most likely Horde)
• Forums
• FAQ
• System Admin (like Webmin)

Before moving www.sluug.org to the new system(s), we need to make sure that we've got all the old content moved over, and pages with all the same names that external sites are pointing at. To make sure, we need to monitor the Apache logs after moving over, to see what non-existant pages people are trying to access.

We discussed backups a little. The consensus was that full backups would not be necessary. We could build the system from scratch just about as quickly as performing a full restore. Instead, we plan to back up only the data and configuration info. I.e. /home (including web sites), /etc, parts of /var (email spool), and maybe /usr/local.

We'll also need to back up the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

For the majority of our backups, we'll probably just transfer the data to another computer across the Internet.

MySQL and PostgreSQL databases require periodic maintanence. For example, Matthew Porter recently explained how failure to VACUUM a PostgreSQL database will lead to very slow access times after about a month of moderate-heavy use.

We have 2 identical systems, so that we can fail over to a backup system if the primary fails. Each system will be doing its own thing under normal conditions. If one system happens to fail, we'll manually switch its functionality over to the other system. Mostly by pointing the DNS records for those services to the other system.

We need to require a password for sudo for those who can run anything through sudo. For those who can only run a few commands, we can allow them to use sudo without a password.

We also need to set up restricted users in sudo, who can only run a few commands.