Loomio
Thu 7 Mar 2019 11:58AM

[itsquad] Moving Etherpad to another server (parley.be)

H HgO Public Seen by 39

As you know, we have a server with Yunohost installed, it's called https://parley.be
Currently, there are really few services, but anyways.

I'm proposing to move the pads from https://pad.pirateparty.be to that server. Two reasons for this :
* Having a server just for the pads seems overkill to me
* With Yunohost, we will be able to manage account [1] for the MyPads plugin [2]. It would be a first step to having one single account for every pirate services (we are still far from that).

The idea is to either keep the url https://pad.pirateparty.be and make a redirect from https://pad.parley.be, or the other way around : we make a redirect to https://pad.parley.be from https://pad.pirateparty.be (I hope it's not too confusing :confused:)

[1] It's a bit technical, but Yunohost proposes a LDAP server, which let you create accounts. Your account will then be used to login to the different services.
[2] see https://mypads.framapad.org/mypads/ for a demo

I

Ilja Thu 7 Mar 2019 4:40PM

does the mypads need root? If not I really rather keep the current url parley.be/pads
Having a subdomain for each service means
1. more maintenance and more that can go wrong.
2. Most notable thing to go wrong is cert-problems. The more we use one domain, the faster we'll hear if something goes wrong and therefore the faster we can fix it.

If the problem with mypads is that it can only work from one domain... then I really don't know. For know I'd say parley as main domain and a proxy pass for ppbe domain for legacy reasons.

But the first question to ask is if we want login on parley. This means that people will rely on it and therefore creates
1. a single point of failure,
2. more work for us and
3. more stress if a service breaks because everyone relies on it

I rather have crews have their own servers. Liege already has one, and therefore already have all their tools with single-sign-on. In W-Vl we also have a ynh, but only use it for mail rn

H

HgO Thu 28 Mar 2019 2:09PM

Hey Ilja ! Thanks for your comment !

I didn't want to actually create a debate about pad.parley.be vs parley.be/pads. My point is more : we can merge two servers since it's technically faisible (and quite easy).

Anyways, I don't think there would be more maintenance with a subdomain. The renewal script is automated, so having one or ten certificates doesn't change anything.

If the problem with mypads is that it can only work from one domain

It doesn't. It's just a preference, and I really think both are equivalent technically. I just find pad.parley.be more elegant, that's it.

But the first question to ask is if we want login on parley.

What do you mean ? As I said, the proposal is just about merging the Etherpad server. It's already there, and pirates are already using it. Although unknown from everybody, Mypads already exists on pad.pirateparty.be/mypads, for instance.

Ideally, that would be better to decentralize, indeed. But I think we should probably keep some services in common (wiki, pad, mastodon), as some are not easy to maintain (Mastodon and MediaWiki) or known to be unstable (Etherpad can be tricky to update, and we had issues in the past with piratepad.be…)

I think it would be better to document how to install and maintain those services, as I did with Mastodon [1]

[1] See this page : https://wiki.pirateparty.be/ITSquad/Mastodon/Maintenance

I

Ilja Thu 28 Mar 2019 4:33PM

Oh, yes, I guess I'm going a bit off topic then '
Merging the servers will save us 8,35€/month, so yes, if feasible, I think we should.

There is already a reverse proxy from https://parley.be/pads/ to pad.pirateparty.be, so adding pad.pirateparty.be to ynh and pointing pad.pirateparty.be to the parly server and set it up there should be enough.

F

Flo Wed 27 Mar 2019 10:32AM

NB: I get this message when i go to pad.parley.be:
"Peer's Certificate issuer is not recognised".
I am not really tech but we also can use:
1. https://board.net/ (you also can use the same account for different services via https://www.fairkom.eu)
2. https://paper.komun.org from https://komun.org/en/

I

Ilja Wed 27 Mar 2019 5:11PM

These seem nice indeed, but not what we're going for. We want to self-host as much as possible. There are several reasons for that:

  1. Not bother other hosters
  2. Have better control of our tools/environment
  3. We've decided to use yunohost as a platform. This approach allows people to get to know a tool like yunohost and both empowers them as well as making the yunohost community bigger
  4. It helps keeping things decentralised

The reason why you get the message is because pad.parley.be doesn't exist. https://parley.be does exists. We've recently set it up with a couple of simple tools as a start.

H

HgO Mon 29 Apr 2019 11:20AM

Thanks to @vanecx who alerted me about this, we are now using the new Etherpad's theme ! It was already available in the current version, but there was a setting to activate.

Framasoft wrote an article (in French) about this new theme : https://framablog.org/2019/04/29/des-framapads-plus-beaux-grace-a-une-belle-contribution/

H

HgO Fri 19 Jul 2019 7:33PM

I'm doing the migration tonight. In order to avoid data loss, I'll stop the server during the migration. The reason is that I first need to take a snapshot of the database to import it to parley.be ;)

H

HgO Fri 19 Jul 2019 8:05PM

Pads are accessible on https://pad.parley.be/ Please let me know if you notice some bugs or glitches ^ I'll make a redirection from pad.pirateparty.be to pad.parley.be once the dns propagation is finished