2019-04-06

protocol.club rebuild update


I've started working on setting up a replacement host for
protocol.club.

It's still a tiny Digital Ocean instance. I don't think my budget can
support dedicated hardware like some other tilde's have.

Maybe someday I'll figure out how to fund something better with
donations, but for now, I'm planning to keep it small and humble.

My main goal with relaunching is to foster a community where projects
like my "IRP" project can be discussed and collaborated on.

One of the things I'd like to figure out how to do well with a
relaunch is consolidated account management so that I can have a bit
more peace of mind about being able to enforce our Code of Conduct.

I'd also like to offer the convenience of consolidated account
management to protocol.club members so that we can expand our presence
into the fediverse with things like pleroma, and maybe matrix.

The first step towards that relaunch has been figuring out how to run
an LDAP server.

I've borrowed from hashbang.sh a dockerized slapd configuration, and
managed to get it running on the new host.

Next, I need to figure out how to actually manage accounts (maybe
borrowing again from hashbang.sh utils), and how to set up pam, etc.

It looks like sssd may be part of the solution, but I'm not sure yet
how much of what I've found in the hashbang Ansible configs will be
needed for our setup.

Oh! I forgot to mention, I'm using Ansible for this rebuild,
too. Previously we had used a shared tilde Puppet module that I never
liked very much and wasn't flexible enough to really meet our needs.

I've used Ansible for work before, but it's been at least a few years,
so I'm getting a chance to learn about all of the new features that
have been added since last I used it.

Once I figure out how I want to organize things and manage secrets,
etc. I'll probably open source the Ansible configs and whatever else I
end up developing.