Just about any and every server needs to be able to send email - whether it's end-user-email, like password recovery services for a website to emails to system administrators reporting on the status of system backups and errors. The problem is that it's non trivial (understatement) to set up a mail server properly.

SkFor any website that requires anyone (users or even just a few admins) to transfer secrets to and from it, you want to ensure the data is end-to-end encrypted. Today various browsers (like Firefox) give warnings when you're sending secret data (like passwords) "in the clear", namely unencrypted.

The OERu offers a wide array of online services, all Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), for the benefit of its global learner community, its partner representatives, and educators in general.

As of this writing, in February 2021, we run the following production systems:

As a matter of principle, the OER Foundation makes use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) wherever possible. Partnering with the Foundation provides an opportunity to share the experience of an organisation with hands-on experience in hosting all its technology infrastructure using FOSS.

The foundation has implemented a component-based approach selecting “best-of-breed” open technologies for assembling the OERu’s Digital Learning Environment (DLE) rather than providing learning materials through a single application like a Learning Management System (LMS).

In light of the current global pandemic, there's lots of interest out there on "working remotely" or "working from home". We've been doing a for years, and it has a lot of advantages... here's how we do it....

For relatively lightweight applications that are either in development, or single user, or have limited requirements for concurrency and massive data sets, SQLite is a superb, full-function, but compact, almost ubiquitous database (it's used on every mobile device, for example).

Update 2023-06-14: Here's a new tutorial for Ubuntu 22.04! Consider this older tutorial obsolete (but possibly helpful for people with older systems?)

Because the collaboration of an open community is its real history, I place a high value on backing up the Rocket.Chat servers I'm responsible for, and especially the data they generate, held in MongoDB files (on the host) managed by a MongoDB container.

To do that reliably, I have set up a bash script which does an hourly backup of all MongoDB "databases" and automatically maintains 24 hourly, 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly, and 7 yearly snapshots of the databases.

With the recent release of Rocket.Chat 1.0.x (after a couple years undergoing development at a fairly blistering pace), it's time for many of us to upgrade!

Previously, I showed how to install Rocket.Chat via Docker Compose but that was a much earlier version of Rocket.Chat and version 3.4 of MongoDB, which is now quite old (by FOSS standards at least). And it turns out upgrading everything has a few gotchas, so here's how I managed to do it.

Rather than write a slide-based presentation for the Open Education miniconf at Linux.Conf.AU 2019, I thought I'd try an approach that seemed to work quite well recently: write my presentation as a blog post and make it available for posterity, before and after. You can find this post quickly by going to oer.nz/lca if you want to look at it on your own device.