Difference between revisions of "News"

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We have a news page because the [[Forums|other forums]] can tend to be a little chatty and irrelevant -- ''as they should be''. Latest news goes on top.
 
We have a news page because the [[Forums|other forums]] can tend to be a little chatty and irrelevant -- ''as they should be''. Latest news goes on top.
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= 2011-08-27 =
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== Member Net updated ==
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This news is a little late in coming, but I figure I should mention that [[User:Key|Key]] has been the coolest ProgClubber to date with her very slick [http://www.progclub.net/~key720/ Member Net web-page]. That's her second cut, and it looks even better than her first version. It's very cool to see members participating in Member Net, thanks Key! Also, [[User:Tasaio|Tasaio]] was the first to experiment with [http://www.progclub.net/ Member Net], and he's got a test page up there at the moment -- looking forward to seeing that develop as he finds some time. Thanks to you two guys for leading the way at ProgClub!
  
 
= 2011-08-26 =
 
= 2011-08-26 =

Revision as of 15:11, 27 August 2011

We have a news page because the other forums can tend to be a little chatty and irrelevant -- as they should be. Latest news goes on top.

2011-08-27

Member Net updated

This news is a little late in coming, but I figure I should mention that Key has been the coolest ProgClubber to date with her very slick Member Net web-page. That's her second cut, and it looks even better than her first version. It's very cool to see members participating in Member Net, thanks Key! Also, Tasaio was the first to experiment with Member Net, and he's got a test page up there at the moment -- looking forward to seeing that develop as he finds some time. Thanks to you two guys for leading the way at ProgClub!

2011-08-26

New members

ProgClub welcomes Teejay, Asher and Con. More information on the Members page.

Happy birthday!

Yesterday, ProgClub turned one month old. And what a month it's been! We've seen the club grow from 1 member to 15, and from a simple wiki to a full featured club with SSH logins, email and lots of web facilities. Happy birthday ProgClub!

2011-08-22

New members

ProgClub welcomes Dalafyn1960 and Kevlin. More information on the Members page.

New projects

Two new projects have been documented: Pcmnet and Pcweb. These contain the files for ProgClub's web-sites: Member Net, Mobile Net and the administration web-site. These projects had previously been released, but their project pages exist now.

Policy updates

The policies have been updated. Again! This time I've added a section for the club's Values, and updated What we do and the Constitution to account for these. I've also modified the Copyright policy to include an updated Contributor License Agreement wherein contributors authorise the ProgClub executive to modify the licensing terms for any of ProgClub's projects in the spirit of the club. The Contributor License Agreement will be linked from all ProgClub project pages from the Contributors section. The terms and conditions were updated with a new notice of changes policy whereby the process now includes an announcement on the ProgClub announcement list. There were some other minor updates to the wording of the Copyright policy.

2011-08-21

Spam filtering enabled

I've installed spamassassin (man, wasn't that a chore!), and it should all be working properly now. Of course, it's not really tested very well, because we're not getting much spam at the moment. admin@progclub.com was a publicly advertised email address of the previous domain owner, so there is a little bit of spam coming through on that, but there hasn't been any in the last few hours. I guess it's just wait and see if the spam filtering is effective or not.

HTTPS *broken*

I was playing tricks with my Subject Alternative Names for my certificate from godaddy.com. I only had 5 SANs, and I needed about 20, so what I did was reissue the certificate with different SANs and created a set of certificates. But... they revoked the old certificates! So, at the moment, the club doesn't have a valid SSL cert. The good news is that I've parted with $700 and got a new certificate on order, but for some reason they are being very slow in delivering it. Anyway, HTTPS will be operational again soon.

Update: it's fixed now.

Mail filters help

I've started some documentation to help users of the mailing lists with mail filters. If you've got a spare minute and are using a mail client other than Thunderbird, it'd be cool if you explained how to create the mail filters on your client software. Note: I updated mailing lists with a pointer to the mail filters doco.

Web server reconfiguration

I've updated the DNS records for ProgClub so that the correct servers are used for the correct services. The following services are being provided by the following hosts:

2011-08-20

Mailing lists operational

The ProgClub Mailing lists are now operational. I've changed the details of the mailing list policy to take account of the new lists and the fact that the lists are now functional. Anyone can join any of the lists, except for the admin list which is only for ProgClub administrators. Anyone can post to any of the lists, except for the ProgClub announcement list which requires approval by an administrator. All of the lists except for the admin list have public archives. Information about the lists is best seen on the Mailing lists page. How about you head over there and subscribe? I will subscribe all members to the announcement list, the other lists are at your option.

p.s. First post!

2011-08-19

Email is working!

Email is now functional at ProgClub. I still need to go though and create everyone's accounts, but the servers have been setup. We have secure IMAP, POP3 and SMTP services for members, along with email forwarding and the potential to host other domains. Our email services are all secured with a proper signed certificate!

Announcing Mobile Net

ProgClub has launched ProgClub Mobile Net! Mobile Net is available from http://progclub.mobi/ (HTTPS is supported too), and it's an area for sharing web apps optimised for mobile devices. So, to use Mobile Net: put a 'public_mobile' directory containing your mobile friendly web content in your home directory, and Mobile Net will do the rest! Browse to http://progclub.mobi/ from your mobile phone to check it out!

2011-08-18

Web statistics available

A web site statistics package, awstats, has been configured on charity. Now you can view ProgClub's web-site usage statistics.

2011-08-17

Pccipher released

A new project has been released at ProgClub: Pccipher. Pccipher is a Javascript and PHP encryption library, currently implementing the Blowfish encryption algorithm.

2011-08-15

Policy updates

The terms and conditions have been updated with a statement that usage of ProgClub facilities indicates acceptance of the terms and conditions. The mailing list policy was updated with some additional commentary. The copyright policy was updated with a link to the new pcrepo browser.

jj5-bin released

A new project, jj5-bin, has been instituted for managing and sharing John's administration and utility scripts.

2011-08-14

New logo == hacker emblem

ProgClub has a new logo! It's the hacker emblem, which is a sign of solidarity with the following values:

  • Creating software and sharing it with each other
  • Placing a high value on freedom of inquiry; hostility to secrecy
  • Information-sharing as both an ideal and a practical strategy
  • Upholding the right to fork
  • Emphasis on rationality
  • Distaste for authority
  • Playful cleverness, taking the serious humorously and humour seriously

You can read more about the history of the club's logo on the ProgClub logo page.

User logins now working on user machines

Hope and Honesty have been configured with Kerberos/LDAP/PAM/NFS clients as needed to facilitate Single sign-on. So the Single sign-on project is pretty much finished! There's a process for adding new users. It'll take me a little while to go through and add all our current members, and I haven't done that yet. First I thought I'd post about the success of the Single sign-on project! That's six completed projects now!

Member web-pages operational

Now members can create a public_html directory in their home directory, and it will be served from the user domains. So that's http://www.progclub.net/ -- now operational! It's working for HTTPS too https://www.progclub.net/

Still need to theme it and flesh out the content a little, but that's basically the idea. At last Webpage creation has useful content.

2011-08-13

Pcview released

A new project was started and released: Pcview. This means that pcrepo can now be browsed on the web.

2011-08-12

progclub.com live

It's official, ProgClub has progclub.com! It's now a functional administrative domain of the club's. We've registered and re-delegated the domain, and it's ours for at least the next 5 years. There might be a slight delay in DNS record propagation, but disregarding that everything else is configured and ready to roll. Thanks very much ProgClub!

Subversion releases

There are now instructions for releasing ProgClub projects, which refer to our Subversion process. There's an article on the blog about our Subversion release script.

2011-08-11

Administration pages protected

The various ProgClub administration pages, such as the Executive, Constitution, and Terms and conditions, etc., have been flagged as "protected" in the wiki. Only ProgClub wiki administrators (i.e. John) are allowed to change these documents. So, we won't have any silly business with our constitution or policies being re-written by spammers or trolls.

Copyrights, licenses, etc.

Each ProgClub project now has Contributors and Copyright sections that detail the copyright holders and licensing terms for the project. It all seems very professional! So far we're using the New BSD and GPL (v2) licenses, and I think that's pretty much all we're ever gonna need. Maybe one day we'll see the LGPL or MIT licenses too. The Copyright policy covers contributions to ProgClub forums and projects.

Policy updates

Mailing lists have been incorporated as a policy in the terms and conditions. The CLA in the Copyright policy was updated to cover use of ProgClub forums. The ProgClub forums copyright policy was updated to allow for copying from public domain or similar free sources. Looking forward to the day that our policies are stable!

Project template

There's a Project template that can be used for kick-starting a project along with some instructions on the Projects page. Now what we need are lots of started and never to be finished projects! (Hey, ProgClub has finished four projects, cancelled only one, have three under active development, and two on the back-burner. Not bad at all! Here at ProgClub we get things done!)

2011-08-10

Pcwiki release

I updated the Pcwiki page with a Notes for implementers section, and posted to the wikitech-l list about my mods to MediaWiki. It'd be pretty exciting if they're interested in them!

Update: no-one is particularly interested in my contributions. :(

2011-08-09

System upgrades

Charity has been upgraded from 256 MB of RAM to 512 MB of RAM, and system backups have been enabled. This has had a noticeable effect on performance of the web-site. It will be upgraded further if swap usage gets out of hand again. The other machines will be upgraded too if need be. At the moment provisioning of ProgClub machines is costing Blackbrick $996 per year.

IPSec troubleshooting

I've been talking to Slicehost support about the IPSec issues we've been having. They've been great -- very helpful. They're looking into trying to reproduce the error in another environment for further diagnosis. Will keep you posted if there's any resolution.

Update: Slicehost was able to reproduce the error, but they don't know how to fix it. We're giving up. We'll pursue other methods of encryption, i.e., SSHFS rather than NFS+IPSec.

Policy updates

Still trying to get our policies right. I imagine this will all settle down a little once we're established and I won't need to post a notice of policy updates every day. There is now a general terms and conditions page which introduces all ProgClub terms and conditions, and there was a minor update to the CLA in the copyright policy. All policies had some minor modifications to fix up the formatting.

Pcwiki upgrade

Pcwiki has been upgraded to support a section link on each section. These appear between the 'edit' and 'top' links. Section links will link you to a particular section on the canonical URL.

Pcldap released

A new project Pcldap has been released. It's to provide the LDAP administration facility.

2011-08-08

Cweb planning

A new project, to develop a distributed search engine, has entered its planning phase on the ProgClub wiki. See Cweb.

Policy updates

All ProgClub policies have been updated.

2011-08-07

LDAP progress

Progress has been made on the LDAP configuration of Charity. OpenLDAP is now installed and mostly configured. Thanks Friggles!

Policy updates

A copyright policy and a general disclaimer have been added to ProgClub's policies.

2011-08-06

Software released

The Pcma and Pcblog projects have been released, and moved to the completed projects list. Which means...

We have a blog!

A blog is now available for ProgClub members. If a blog post falls in the woods, and there's no-one there to read it, does it make a sound?

ProgSoc fixed HTTPS

HTTPS to ProgSoc now works for its .org domain, so I've moved secure web-site to the redundant points of difference. Well done ProgSoc.

Our graphic artist is hard at work coming up with our real logo. Here's his first sketch.

Logo sketch.jpg

2011-08-05

IPSec abandoned

IPSec is too hard. It was getting in the way of Kerberos connectivity, and I've disabled it.

Kerberos configured

The Kerberos project has been a success. Charity is now configured as the Kerberos Key Distribution Centre (KDC). We're now pending Kerberos SSH integration, and a few other things for Single sign-on.

ProgRock

We're still waiting for our new progclub.com domain -- it's expected to be about a week off completing transfer -- but we've already mirrored the progclub.com web-site, and put up a ProgRock page for antiquity.

New members

ProgClub welcomes Sclaughl and Jedd. More information available on the Members page.

2011-08-03

progclub.com

Blackbrick has shelled out $500 for the progclub.com domain. Soon it will be an administrative domain of the club's! Thank you ProgClub!

Email underway

We're starting up our Email project. Soon our email facilities will be functional.

Hack-fest this weekend!

Friggles will be heading to John's house in the Blue Mountains this weekend to work on ProgClub Network administration. Join us if you'd like!

2011-08-01

ProgClub policies

ProgClub has updated Privacy, Account locking, Acceptable use and Firewall policies.

Domains are now configured

Information about the configuration of ProgClub domains is now available on the Domains page.

In brief, user domains are progclub.net and progclub.co, while administrative domains are progclub.org and progclub.info. The canonical user domain is progclub.net, and the canonical administrative domain is progclub.org. You should generally use the canonical name when writing documentation or publishing links.

IPSec is configured

The IPSec project is essentially complete. Hosts on the ProgClub network now communicate over encrypted connections.

Single sign-on is underway

The Single sign-on project has been commenced. Soon users will be able to login to the user machines.

Pcwiki released

The Pcwiki project has undergone several releases. That's the software that's driving the ProgClub wiki. With the latest version of Pcwiki comes valid HTML5 along with the validation icon that you can see on the bottom of every page, the cool green/orange/black fixed-width font skin that you see (called OldSkool), and some other minor polish. If you don't like the OldSkool skin you can turn it off.

New members

ProgClub has had its founding members sign up. ProgClub welcomes Tasaio, SanguineV, Key, Friggles, Jav, Andymcm and Kulov. More information is available on the Members page.