ubuntu linux

Dropbox is the best known of the end-user "cloud storage" services for documents, backups, and synchronising data among multiple devices, although now Google's Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive are functionally similar and are being heavily promoted and tied into all sorts of services.

Not long ago, Mastodon, an open source, federated alternative to the proprietary network-effect wunderkind, Twitter, came out of no where.

A few months back, I posted instructions on deploying Rocket.Chat and Wekan instances (and their mutual dependency, MongoDB) individually. Since then, I've spent some time with Docker Compose, a set of scripts which help you to define, build, and manage a set of Docker containers. Docker Compose is a thing of beauty. This is the way I now deploy Rocket.Chat, Wekan, and MongoDB together.

Our approach to technology here at the OERu is inspired by the UNIX tool philosophy which can be summarised as follows:

"create simple tools that do one job well, and make it easy to combine them to work together"

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.

At the OERu we have two separate instances of market category leading Discourse Forum: one for OER partner and contributor collaborators and the other for learners. These days, online forums are seen as a bit old-school: fuddy-duddy. From my point of view, however, Discourse is "Forum-NG" (a Next Generation forum).

Mautic is an open source marketing automation web application.

Rocket.Chat is a modern, open source messaging application which is functionally similar to a popular (and heavily marketed) proprietary tool called Slack.

Wekan is an excellent, easy-to-use "kanban board" project management support tool, suitable for all manner of projects. For those who have used the highly marketed Trello kanban service, Wekan is functionally similar open source alternative that organisations can host and control for themselves. They can also enhance it in whatever ways they are moved to do so. We encourage our partner institutions to consider this path as a way of reducing costs as well as increasing freedom and privacy.

This post describes installing MongoDB (and backing it up and restoring from backup) in a Docker container on an Ubuntu Linux 14.04 virtual machine. (Update: 2017-05-24 we've just published an easier way to run MongoDB and Rocket.Chat and Wekan which depend on it)