WikiThis page describes the machinery used by the Oekonux community. This page is motivated by a thread about this topic on the project list, which cares about the organization of the project.
The intention of this page is to reflect the current state of the machinery. It is originally written in German which is available as the first version of this page.
Overview
The Oekonux community currently uses the following technical facilities:
As far as I know other facilities such as IRC are currently not used.
Dedicated Oekonux server
There is a dedicated server for the Oekonux project. Currently this is a virtual server based on Debian and hosted by Host Europe. This dedicated server is paid by the Projekt Oekonux e.V., a registered association in Germany.
Today the server runs all of the technical infrastructure of the project. It has a fixed IP address and the DNS entries for the domains point to this server. The generic address of the server is server.oekonux.de.
The general maintainer of this server is HolgerWeiss, certain facilities are maintained mainly by StefanMerten. See /Administration for technical maintenance documentation.
Mailing lists
Existing lists
The following lists exist:
liste AT oekonux DOT de
list-en AT oekonux DOT org
projekt AT oekonux DOT de
chat AT oekonux DOT de
mitglieder AT oekonux DOT de
helpers AT oekonux-conference DOT org
Only for conferences.
speakers AT oekonux-conference DOT org
Only for conferences.
For all mailing lists there are archives, which are on the web sites of the domain they belong to.
Hosting
All mailing lists are hosted on the Oekonux server. The mailing lists are all served by a Majordomo.
Features
Spam protection
Mail to all mailing lists is routed over a SpamAssassin. This is indispensable because the addresses of the mailing lists have a wide distribution.
The SpamAssassin installation needs some maintenance once in a while to be ready for the latest ideas of spammers. This maintenance is done by StefanMerten.
Unfortunately the spam filtering does not catch all spam 
.
Therefore the mailing lists have been closed so only subscribers can
post to the list unmoderated. The bounces of spam and legitimate mail
from non-subscribers are handled by StefanMerten. All other tasks
necessary for keeping the mailing lists running are also handled by
StefanMerten.
Web sites
Hosting
Provider
There is no special provider for the web sites. All web sites are hosted on the Oekonux server.
In former times before conferences resources of the OpenTheory project are used for online creation and presentation of the program of the conference. This has been replaced by a Pentabarf installation.
Domains
There are four domains for which the e.V. is the owner:
oekonux.de
Under www the German main page of the project can be found.
oekonux.org
Under www the international main page of the project can be found.
Also the Wikis are all hosted here:
en.wiki
The English language Wiki.
de.wiki
The German language Wiki.
oekonux-konferenz.de
The German domain for everything around the Oekonux conferences.
www
Entry point for the most recent conference.
erste, zweite, dritte, vierte
Entry points for the respective conference.
oekonux-conference.org
The international domains for everything around the Oekonux conferences.
www
Entry point for the most recent conference.
second, third, fourth
Entry points for the respective conference.
More domains were present before the e.V. took them over but they have been abandoned.
Features
Web space
Web space is not a big issue.
Traffic
There are statistics about the network traffic and the page hits.
Mail addresses
All domains support a couple of mail addresses. They are mainly used for the mailing lists.
Besides the functional mail addresses there is only one private mail address. Generally it is possible to create more private mail addresses. Such private mail address must contain the family name of the person.
Generation and Upload
At the moment all content of the web sites is generated by StefanMerten on his private computer and uploaded onto the server. Among other facilities the SDF and reStructuredText formats are used and the whole thing is embedded in a make based automation.
Static pages
Apart from the Wiki pages nearly all pages in the Oekonux domains are static HTML pages without any JavaScript or other active elements. By this they are
usable by all browsers
readable for all times
no security risk for the server
stable URLs without variable parts
Many search engines ignore links containing a ?.
need no maintenance
friendly to external search engines
Though navigation is done by frames there is always a <noframes> section which contains the links.
can be downloaded with tools like wget completely and without problems
works with every web hosting offer
Navigation
Navigation is realized with frames. A narrow frame on the left is modeled after a file browser. It permanently presents the current position in the site. The right frame contains the selected content. If a directory is selected in the navigation the content frame default.html always appears.
Apart from this each third level domain has a separate site map.
Links in all pages are followed by QBullets which roughly give the type of the link.
Locale search engine
We use ht://Dig as a local search engine.
.RSS-Feed
Content
General
Archives
All mailing lists of the project are archived on the web sites. StefanMerten converts the incoming mails to HTML by MHonArc and uploaded automatically.
HTML pages for the archives are filtered. At the moment
- comments of MHonArc are removed
- phone numbers are replaced by a fixed text
- names of certain people who decided too late that they not want to be found in Oekonux by Google are abbreviated
- all URLs pointing to mail addresses are obfuscated a bit
- mail addresses are obfuscated
Removal of archived pages is also widely automated. However, it needs an explicit call with the number of the mail to remove.
Texts
Several texts of the project are available on the web sites.
Among them is an introduction for which MagicPoint sources are available.
Link page
One of the most important content resources of the Oekonux community once was the Oekonux links, where interesting links are entered with a short comment. The page is structured.
It would be good if each of the Oekonux links would get a creation date. Meanwhile this would have some historical value.
In general for existing links this would be possible by cvs annotate.
Statistics
Statistics are available about the usage of the mailing lists as well as about the web sites usage on the web sites. All statistics are created weekly by some Free Software (webalizer, mail2clf, mail2chart) automatically by StefanMerten and uploaded.
OpenTheory
Many texts from the project and from its environment are available in the OpenTheory project. Some of them are gathered in the Oekonux OpenTheory project.
The texts are about Oekonux content as well as for organizational purposes. In particular the conference preparation has been done there.
Meanwhile OpenTheory facilities are no longer used and are replaced by the Wiki.
Wiki
Currently there are two Oekonux Wikis at
They are based on the MoinMoin Wiki engine.
The content is maintained by a group of maintainers (English, German . The technical part of the Wikis is maintained by StefanMerten.
Pentabarf
As a planning tool for the 4th Oekonux Conference a Pentabarf installation has been set up.
News groups
Since end of 2003 the main discussion mailing lists are available through Gmane as Usenet newsgroups:
news://news.gmane.org/gmane.politics.oekonux.german
Mirrors liste AT oekonux DOT de.
news://news.gmane.org/gmane.politics.oekonux.english
Mirrors list-en AT oekonux DOT org.
The newsgroups are configured in a way replies by news are not possible.
Features
Search engine
Gmane has a search engine which searches the newsgroups.
