SWARPAnet News
2006-01-30 - Migration to Mailman
We're in the process of migrating our mailing lists to Mailman; below
is the message that Chaos sent to all-fun when the first wave of lists
migrated, for reference.
From: Chaos Golubitsky
Reply-To: sysadmins@swarpa.net
To: all-fun@swil.org
Subject: [ALL-FUN] Migration of swil.org mailing lists
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 22:53:35 -0500
Message-ID: <20060117035335.GG84165@glassonion.org>
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You are getting this message because you are subscribed to one or
more mailing lists at swil.org. Beginning within the next day or
two, and concluding within a week, we will be migrating all swil.org
lists from the Majordomo list software to Mailman.
You do not need to do anything, but we wanted to inform you about
some effects of the list migration which will be visible to list
subscribers. The remainder of this message will cover:
1. The Mailman user interface
2. Changes to default list posting policies
3. How to filter Mailman messages using procmail
1. The Mailman user interface
At the time of migration, you will receive an e-mail from each list
to which you are subscribed. That e-mail will contain an introductory
message, and also your randomly-generated list password. As an
anti-abuse mechanism, Mailman requires you to use your password
whenever you want to interact with the list software. If you lose
it, you can go to the list's web interface:
https://web.swil.org/mailman/listinfo/
(where is the name of the mailing list), and have it
e-mailed to you. For the most part, interaction with Mailman lists
is done via the web interface found at that address. However, there
is also an e-mail interface to each list. We have written some
hints for interacting with Mailman via e-mail, which can be found at:
http://www.swarpa.net/docs/mailman.html
In particular, note that e-mailing majordomo@swil.org will no longer
allow you to get information about mailing lists. Instead, each
individual list can be reached at the address -request@swil.org.
2. Changes to default list posting policies
In order to help prevent accidental mail misdirection, we are using
Mailman to implement some improved filters for swil.org mailing
lists. If you send a post to a mailing list whose subject header
contains the word "Re:" but does not contain the subject tag (e.g.
'[CHAT]') of the mailing list to which you are sending, the message
will be rejected and bounced back you with an explanatory error.
This is a generalization of previous filters which existed on the
chat list, and will have the effect that, for instance, if you reply
to a message on debate and inadvertently send your response to chat,
your message will probably be caught and bounced back to you.
There will be an explicit exception whereby posts with '[CHAT]' in
the subject may be posted to the debate list. Similar exceptions
can be setup as needed for other lists.
Note that this change will affect cross-posted messages: If someone
sends a reply-all follow-up to a cross-posted message (such that
the reply is sent to both lists), the reply will be bounced by the
filter from one of the lists (whichever one doesn't match the subject
tag). The net result is that you should probably refrain from
cross-posting messages, which we hope won't be too much of a problem.
Along similar lines, if you want to intentionally redirect a reply
from an off-list conversation to a swil.org list, you should edit
the subject line to remove the "Re:".
This is an experimental policy change. We can easily tune the
filters later as we get more data about how well they work, and we
can revisit the policy if it turns out to have undesirable side
effects.
3. How to filter Mailman messages using procmail
If you are using procmail to filter your swil.org list e-mail, you
may need to rewrite your filters. For Mailman lists, a good header
on which to filter is:
List-Id: .*
(where "listname" is the name of the mailing list). Note that the
Id contains a '.' rather than than an '@' symbol.
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about the
list migration. We plan to begin moving lists within a day or two,
and to complete the migration within a week.
Your SWARPAnet administrators,
Chaos and Josh
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2005-06-23 - Welcome to SWARPAnet
Josh and Chaos are pleased to announce the the inception of SWARPAnet,
a joint project to use professionally run hardware and bandwidth to host
the computing resources we provide. We have a domain (swarpa.net [1]) and
a server (melfpelt.swarpa.net [2]). In late May we moved e-mail, DNS, and
login service for the domains Josh had previously been running out of his
apartment on workstations over residential DSL (infersys.com, swil.org,
eastgate.net, los-robles.org). During the latter half of June, we plan to
move the rest of Josh's services (web and IRC), as well as all of the
services Chaos runs on her residential DSL (keyfitz.org).
Josh and Chaos are currently the "Partners" of the system, which means
that we're jointly responsible for its operation, primarily in the realms
of system administration and financial obligation. Having two sysadmins
will let us work together to set up new services, allow us each to take
advantage of things the other has already done, and provide coverage for
each other when one of us is out of town or otherwise unavailable.
We also intend to use this more robust and reliable platform to offer
services to the extended SWIL community. We haven't yet figured out the
details of how this will work, but we expect that a login account, a web
site (either under an existing site or at a domain of your own), and/or
mail hosting (ditto) should be pretty straightforward if you want to
become a SWARPAnet "User" (beyond stuff like subscribing to mailing
lists). We won't formally charge a fee to become a User, as we enjoy doing
this stuff; but we do plan to accept contributions from those who can
afford it and would like to chip in, to help cover the costs of the
server. We'll figure out and write up some details about this stuff over
the next few weeks.
(BTW, if one of us was already providing those services for you, you'll
continue to have uninterrupted access to them via SWARPAnet. Chaos has
already notified her users (so if you didn't get a message from her, let
us know), and Josh will soon contact the folks who he has been
hosting.)
We're also willing to consider taking on additional Partners, who would
have both the ability to do sysadmin type work on the system, and the
obligation to pay for a share of the costs. Becoming a Partner is more
involved than becoming a User: Partners will have to work closely with us,
and abide by the rules we've developed for system maintenance (ticketing
system for tracking requests, CVS for configuration changes, filesystem
layout policy, etc), so we're only willing to add people as Partners if we
believe that we can work well with them as a team. If you're interested,
get in touch with us, and we'll talk further.
Stay tuned for more details! And if you have any questions, comments,
etc, just let us know.
-Josh & Chaos
[1] SW as in SWAPA, ARPA as in ARPA or DARPA.
[2] Our "theme", should we have more systems in the future, is
"things from board games" (and probably card games and RPGs if we
feel like it).