[FairLakesTeaparty] Technical committee meeting notes

[Stuart Gathman]

WARNING: technical information follows.  If it looks like gobbledy gook to you, don't let that deter you from posting to this list!

After investigating the current setup, George and I decided on the following action items:

1) I will create a fairlakesteaparty.com DNS zone that I can edit, with existing A and MX records. We will ask Ron to set the NS records (nameservers) to my nameservers.  Note that Ron can change the nameservers back at any time, so this is not irrevocable.

2) Our domain expires on Sep 10, 2011.  Near that time, we may wish to transfer the domain to our own registrar account.  There needs to be more than one person with access to the registration to avoid problems when the single owner becomes too busy or has an accident.  The registration is the ultimate key to the domain, and the access holders should be elected and rotated.  We have a year to decide on a reasonable procedure that balances informal with reliable.

2a) Register fairlakesteaparty.org domain to prevent misuse.  There is no technical barrier to registering it, but Ron says there is some legal barrier to actually using it.  I don't know if this is true - can someone research this?  (Note that there is a technical barrier to registering a .gov domain, so the lack of a barrier to .org makes me doubt the legal aspect.)  Perhaps fairlakesteaparty.net should be grabbed also.  Each domain costs about $9/yr to keep registered.  So the three domains come to $27/yr.

3) Once I control DNS for the domain, I will keep the current website hosted at godaddy.com for now.  But I will redirect the emails to my own email servers, and establish the following aliases:

  chair at fairlakesteaparty.com
  secretary@
  treasurer@
  webmaster@
  postmaster@
  info@

I will be postmaster, George will be webmaster, and all the others I will point at Sandy until there are other volunteers.  :-)

I will move this mailing list to discuss at fairlakesteaparty.com.  I will make an announcement on the list when the change happens.  There will be a separate announce at fairlakesteaparty.com list that only admins (i.e. Sandy) can post to - everyone who signs up on the new website will be automatically added to the announce list.  But they have to subscribe to the discuss list, which may become filled with flamewars and rants.  :-)

As we form additional committees, each committee will have its own mailing list.  The technical committee will be tech at fairlakesteaparty.com.

4) George will find out from Ron how to get access to the existing website hosting at godaddy, and what services they provide.  He will then install the new static page he has designed on a temporary domain to test, and finally install.  

5) Our next project is to install WordPress content management software, which you can see in use at http:/richmondteaparty.com
WordPress requires PHP and a database (e.g. mysql), so if our godaddy handles that, great.  Otherwise, we will switch to another server (which is easy once I have DNS control).