State of Things

[Gary Kramlich]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 3:18 AM Richard Laager <rlaager at pidgin.im> wrote:

Sorry for my late reply, it's been a busy week with the holiday and
other things.

> So, the project to eliminate the mailing lists is something like this:
>
> 1. "roll out Discourse[3] on a DigitalOcean node, import the mailman
> users lists into it, and create spaces for Pidgin, Finch, Purple, GNT,
> and IMFreedom on it with appropriate threads and stuff to replace our
> existing mailing lists."
>
> 2. Adjust the website to link to Discourse instead of mailing lists.
> Send one last message to the mailing lists pointing people to the
> replacement.
>
> 3. Move archives into some sort of static serving setup.
>
> At that point, our email needs are just outbound relay + inbound
> forwarding. I'm happy to provide that. It's literally a few minutes to
> setup accounts, then we change DNS, and shut off rock.

For number 1, I can get Discourse setup tonight so we can try to move
the mailing list into read-only mode before the December archive hits.

That said, there are some unanswered questions. Do we want to use the
built in of Discourse or do we want to attempt to tie it into
hub.imfreedom.org? I haven't looked at how any of this works yet, so I
can't give a time estimate. Also we need to decide if we're going to
use the DigitalOcean one click app which I don't believe there is a
charge for but will need to verified, or if we're going to try and set
it up ourselves via ansible or something. I'm assuming postgress will
be running on the host and we'll just use the normal volume backups as
our backup solution.

2. This is straight forward, but I need to find the setting to disable
new posts to a list for the interim while we're making these changes.
Also if we can set a bounce/auto-reply method that would probably be
preferred.

3. For the archives, my plan is to create an archive of them, drop
them into data.imfreedom.org, and then use those archives to build
containers that will serve them via our Kubernetes cluster.

There is also the addition of tearing down the existing machine we
stood up to handle email, which should be torn down, but I am
currently using it for service monitoring. So basically we'll just
destroy that vps, create a new one, run the ansible for the service
monitoring, and update dns for status.imfreedom.org and
status.pidgin.im to point to the new very small vps that will be doing
the monitoring.

If you're willing to support outbound relay + inbound forwarding that
is great! Please let me know what changes I need to do for DNS so we
can get that documented and then determine a time to make the changes.

Also, if we're doing a Statement of Work to compensate me for working
on this, we either need to get that defined or define a time box
around it. I'm already at least 2 hours into research and planning for
what it's worth.

> --
> Richard

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>