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Perl Mongers Group Hosting Service FAQ

Big Questions

What Services are Offered?

  - Basic Web Hosting (via WebDAV)
  - Group Mailing Lists (MailMan) 
  - .pm.org DNS

What Services are not offered?

  - Dynamic Web Hosting (cgi-scripts, mason, tt)
  - Shell Access
  - FTP

Why don't you offer service X?

Probably for security reasons.

Do I have to host my PM group website on your server?

No. We're happy to point yourgroup.pm.org DNS anywhere you want.

Who do I contact for help?

Send an email to support(at)pm(dot)org

Maintaining my groups website

How do I upload files?

Access is only supported through WebDAV (http://www.webdav.org).

Recent versions of Windows and Mac OS X have DAV clients built in. Many Linux desktop tools do as well.

For a simple UNIX command line client, try cadaver. (http://www.webdav.org/cadaver.)

Where do I get a username/password?

Go to http://svn.perl.org/ and sign up for a username. You must notify support(at)pm(dot)org so they can associate that username with your pm group.

What if I forget my password?

http://svn.perl.org/ tells you how to reset your password.

Where do I upload files?

https://groups.pm.org/groups/yourgroup/

You must use the 'real' name of your group, not one of its aliases. (i.e. philadelphia, not philly or phl)

What is my group website?

yourgroup.pm.org

How do I use cadaver?

Cadaver works just like most command line FTP clients.

 $ cadaver https://groups.pm.org/groups/yourgroup
 Authentication required for perl.org on server `groups.pm.org':
 Username: yourusername
 Password: yourpassword
 dav:/groups/yourgroup/>

Important commands: get put ls

Why can't I use a FTP client?

Because DAV integrates better with our Authentication and Access Control system. Also, DAV runs over SSL (https) so passwords (and data) are encrypted in transit.

WebDAV on Windows

On 2007-06-24 Doug of OC.pm wrote:

  IE7 must be different...I used this as a guide:
     http://www.hss.caltech.edu/help/web/webdav/accessing/windowsxp
  Basically you go to Start->My Network Places->Add a Network,
  plug in your group web access URL
     https://groups.pm.org/groups/yourgroup
  and it creates a directory where you can just copy/paste files.

Older (obsolete?) instructions:

Using Internet Explorer, click File -> Open and enter 'https://groups.pm.org/groups/yourgroup'. Check the box labelled ``Open as web folder'' and hit Ok. Accept the site certificate and when prompted, enter the username and password that you have had associated with yourgroup. In the resulting folder view you may delete, rename, move, or copy files and drag new files there to upload.

And for those who want to mount it as a disk under Windows, this little tool is very handfull (and free) http://support.novell.com/servlet/filedownload/uns/pub/ndrv41862.exe

I use it because the webdav client of Dreamweaver doesn't seems to like webdav with SSL, but not sure.

WebDAV on Mac OS X

Under Finder, choose Go, then Connect to Server. Under server address, enter:

  https://groups.pm.org/groups/yourgroup

That's it. You now have access to our server via WebDAV just like any other network drive.

(This works great on OS X version 10.4.5. Back on 10.3 I had to use cadaver because WebDAV over https didn't work. I don't know at what exact version they got https working.)

Is there a quota?

There is no hard limit, but we are monitoring disk usage carefully. If a group uses an inappropriate amount of disk space, they will be removed from the server.

What can I upload?

Things related to your perl monger group.

On the old server my site used Mason or Template Toolkit

Sorry, you can't do this anymore, it's a security risk we're not willing to take.

On the old server I had a wiki running

There is no standardized wiki service at this time.

Why don't you have a real SSL certificate?

Because we're cheapskates.

Go here: http://ca.develooper.com/install.html to get the Develooper Root certificate.

DNS

Why would I want to change the DNS for my group?

Because you want to host your group's web server on a server you control. We're happy to point yourgroup.pm.org DNS to your server(s).

Will you delegate NS for my group?

No, sorry. Recent security exploits have convinced us not to delegate DNS offsite.

Will you point MX records to my SMTP server?

We will only do this for established groups. After you've had a few meetings, send us your hostname(s) to which you would like yourgroup.pm.org MX to be directed. (MX records work on hostnames, not IP addresses.)

Email Forwarding

Can you forward email sent to groupname@pm.org? (e.g. omaha@pm.org)

Yes, if you explicitly ask for that. Send a request to support(at)pm(dot)org, specifing the address you would like us to forward to. You must be the group admin for that group.

Can you forward email sent to username@pm.org? (e.g. jay_hannah@pm.org)

No, we don't do this. It's proven to be too much maintenance. Sorry.

Group Mailing Lists

If you like, we'll host a MailMan mailing list for your group. You'll administer your list via the web interface (http://www.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/groupname) and/or by emailing commands to the MailMan server.

Also, as a group leader, you'll be added to a mailing list of your fellow administrators from around the world. It's a low-volume announcement-centric list.

How do I request a new group or to reactivate a group that has been inactive?

99% of the time your group name will be the name of the city in which your meetings will typically be held. So, since I live in Omaha my group name is Omaha.pm.

Send an email to support(at)pm(dot)org. The subject should be ``Omaha.pm - new group request'' or similar. Your email needs to include all of the following:

  Group leader name
  Group leader email address
  Group leader svn.perl.org username
  City
  State/Province
  Region (if applicable)
  Continent
  Country
  Latitude   (in decimal format like "41.224853")
  Longitude  (in decimal format like "-96.122798")
  ... and the answers to the 2 questions below.

(1) Do you want us to host a website for you or are you going to host your own website?

If you want us to host it make sure you've read the parts of this FAQ that explain WebDAV. That's the only way you're going to be able to manage your site content. Plus, you'll have no CGI access, etc.

If you want to host your own we'll need the IP address we should point YourGroup.pm.org to, so please provide that.

(2) Do you want us to host a MailMan mailing list for you?

Just indicate yes or no.

Once you've sent that email you should get a reply back from RequestTracker, the ticketing system we use. A volunteer administrator should be in touch in a week or so.

Who pays for Perl Mongers services?

Our sponsors: http://www.perl.org/siteinfo.html#sponsors

Can I help?

Sure!

Send money to the Perl Foundation (http://www.perlfoundation.org/), or send us hard drives and stuff on wishlist (http://www.perl.org/wishlist.html)

Buy things from our sponsors!

And put the following ad rotation HTML on your group website:

   <script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.perl.org/misc/site-sponsor-js.html"></script>

The output width is fixed at 180, but the height is variable. If you want to personalize the text message, you can add '?notext=1' to the src string.

You can probably see that ad rotation in action at the Omaha Perl Mongers website: http://omaha.pm.org

About this Document

There is a small band of volunteers known as Perl Monger administrators who maintain all the services we offer. This document started in January 2005 when we moved the server (again) and has been hacked and slashed up by various admins since (or not).

This document is not currently in our SubVersion repository. (It should be, but I'm not sure where to put it.)

It officially lives here: http://groups.pm.org/faq.html

Questions/comments to the Perl Mongers admins: support(at)pm(dot)org