Zooid:system

From eg

This page, previously System Info, describes the current zooid services and rules. Currently an HTML page with the same purpose is visible at zooid.org/system. Only legitimate rewrites of this material should go on this page. Any HTML proposed should be posted at zooid.org/system. A log of all changes to that proposed HTML is visible at this link. A log of all changes to the published HTML is visible only to shell users.

This is the single simplest view of what zooid:itself does. For other views see zooid system.

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zooid:system information

Access is provided to individuals for light usage commercial or developmental uses without cost. Access will be ruled by reasonable use. Please don't take over disk space, CPU capacity or other system resources, especially bandwidth; this is a shared connection and bandwidth transfers should be keep to a minimum (generally less than than 100 MB per day unless you have made special arrangements). And of course, do not use the system as a host for illegal activities or immoral acts.

System users asked to keep disk usage to less than 512MB, unless special arrangements are made. Automatic quotas will be implemented if neccesary. Because of the parameters of the system and its no cost access, users specifically asked not to use the system as a "staging area" for transferring large amounts of data. Absolutely no guarantees about data safety, security, or system availability can be made. Please keep your own backups of your data.

Any publically readable file in /home/ may be occasionally but randomly mirrored to an offsite location (note: this does not imply a guarantee of anything). To "opt out" or prevent mirroring of useless or private data, files should be marked not world readable (eg, chmod og-rwx <directory or file name> from the shell or a GUI program like WinSCP. Temporary files should be marked private or removed from your home directory immediately after use. File deletes are also mirrored so mirror data cannot be relied on to recover from accidental deletion unless I'm contacted immediately.

Use chsh to change your shell and chfn to change your user name from the shell.

Please email me your comments and suggestions; they are extremely welcome.

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This shell-oriented system offers the following services.

public_html directory (http://zooid.org/~yourname)

If you don't already have one, you can simply create a directory called "public_html," add appropriate files, and you've got your own home page. Or use a User: page on this wiki (under development).

You may have to set permissions appropriate to external access, to do this use a command like chmod -R og+rx ~/public_html/ from the shell, or an appropriate remote access program.

Virtual Domains If you have your own domain (for example, www.yourname.com), or would like a subdomain of zooid.org, it can be directly hosted from the system. Email me for more information.

Email Access Since the system's capacity has been expanded, you can now send large email messages - but please don't get carried away, more than 4MB is usually too much. Larger files are best passed around by putting them in a public_html directory then sending a pointer to that location, especially when going to multiple people.

An IMAP server is available for use with mail clients. You are strongly encouraged to use this server instead of the POP server. Among other advantages, you can create your own folders that are stored on the server instead of your own system. Because of this you can configure multiple email clients to access the mailbox and Sent-Mail and other data won't be trapped in proprietary mailboxes on various systems.

If possible, you should use SSL-encrypted connections to transfer mail. We are currently using a self-generated certificate for the server, which means if you do this you will have to install the site certificate yourself or tolerate a lot of questions from your client software. Your client software should have options to do this in a somewhat obvious way. You must use an encrypted connection to use the system's SMTP server to send mail to non-system mail addresses.

The steps to do this are as follows:

1. Set your incoming and outgoing mail servers to "confused.zooid.org". You must use the exact same hostname as the host itself uses.
2. Set the incoming (IMAP) and outgoing (SMTP) connections to use an SSL connection. Encrypted outgoing (SMTP) mail goes on port 465, IMAP on 993.
3. Go to the certificate manager for your application and add a root certificate for the zooid.org domain. This lets your system accept the zooid.org certificate which is used during the encryption process. If you don't do this, you'll be prompted every time you transfer mail. Programs vary in how they handle this, email me if you can't get it going.

You do not have to use a secure connection for incoming (IMAP/POP) mail, but you must use a secure connection to send email using the SMTP host to off-site addresses.

From the shell, mutt is recommended as a mail reader. Please email me if you need help getting this running or for help on sharing folders between programs.

You can use _ signs (changed from the more common + sign because some mail services don't allow + signs) in your email address. This is very useful when you want to track email, for example to prevent or detect spam. The system will accept any mail sent to yourname_anything@zooid.org and send it to your mailbox. So, for example, if you were signing up for a service at myservices.com, you could enter your email address as yourname_myservices@zooid.org, and you'd receive mail which indicated exactly where it came from. If myservices.com passed on your email address to other places, you'd know immediately. You can also use this feature when signing up for lists. This feature is especially useful when used in conjunction with email client filtering and sorting features - you can even create .forward_myservices in your home directory, which will forward based only on that specific permutation of your username.

I can also set up virtual mail domains or addresses if you require them.

DNS service List your domain name's address to other Internet hosts. Usually used in conjunction with web or mail hosting.

System documentation Use the man pages to view documentation on commands. Extra documentation for many commands is available under /usr/doc/.

Shell access For the protection of everyone, shell access requires an ssh enabled client. Telnet clients will not work; please protect your password as local attacks on the system could cause problems for everyone. You can access an appropriate client, if you have a Java 1.1 or higher enabled browser, at http://zooid.org/system/mindterm/mindterm.html. For Windows users I recommend the free software PuTTY for secure shell, and WinSCP for secure file copying. WinSCP is available at http://winscp.vse.cz/, an older versioned is archived in the utils directory.

vid_system@zooid.org http://zooid.org/~vid/

Some helpful things:

Zooid:Utils directory