Category: Small Organisation Server

The end goal of the Small Organisation Server project is a system which can provide everything needed for a small organisation, such as the Ambridge Garden Club, to have a presence on the Internet, with transparent accounting for how it is funded. The organisation should be able to own its data and systems. Although it will have to pay for hosting, as it should – there is no such thing as a free lunch – that hosting should be on a standard platform which does not lock the organisation into any particular vendor.

Simplicity of Administration

Small organisations should not need to have more than a minimal knowledge of computer administration.

Automatic updates

The software should update with the minimum attention needed from the administrator, who should not need to deal with a different update system for each component.

Modular

Not every small organisation will want every facility, for example a choir might want some form of music repository, and a garden club might not have a use for that.

Simple to use

Single identity and password

Federation and other organisations

Many people have multiple interests, and the system should not try to be the only one they use.

Stability

There is a clash between a desire to have the latest and greatest, and having a system which focuses on continuity. Although the organisation will be interested in keeping up to date with what it is interested in, e.g. gardening, that does not mean that it should need the very latest software.

Non-goals

All designs involve compromises, trade offs between, for example complexity and power. These are the choices I believe to be appropriate for the target types of Small Organisation.

Extreme privacy and security.

Hosting on a base you do not own, such as a hosted virtual computer (or even a real computer in a data centre) requires a level of trust in your host. There is a theoretical possibility, for example, that your hosting provider can read all of your data. The same applies to government level agencies, well funded criminal gangs etc. However such operations are expensive, and if that is a concern then you are in a different category of organisation.

Scaling to enormous sizes

Some software or systems do not scale to support thousands, or millions of people on the same platform. This causes them to be dismissed by people who want to be able to run huge systems. If you are expecting to grow to those sort of sizes you should be planning for some paid dedicated IT staff.

Applications – what can it do ?

The purpose of a Server is to serve, to serve the needs of the people who own it (Also true for the servers which belong to Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon etc). Here I put some of the things which might be useful to a Small Organisation on the Internet.

Mail

One of the key building blocks of the internet, and also often now used as a proxy for identity. It should be possible for members of the organisation to contact each other through email, and possibly at their choice have their emails forwarded to another system, or read to write emails from the server. This should be compliant with technical standards for mail authentication, such as DMARC, without needing the administrators to have to understand the technicalities. Ideally it should support filtering via Sieve, and reading and writing mail either through a web interface or standard email client programs.

Mailing lists

Sending emails to large numbers of recipients is a specialist area, particularly if there are doubts about whether they want the emails or not, and if the small organisation wants to do that type of thing they should pay a specialist. However for cases like contacting committee members, or possibly, for example a small charity to update previous donors (who are willing to be contacted) a mailing list manager can be useful.

Web pages

These are the public face of the organisation, and it should be relatively easy for those members of the organisation who represent it to update them. This will probably not be every member, and it should be clear, at least internally, who said what. Some form of content management system, such as WordPress or Drupal, integrated with the rest of the user administration should be possible.

Surveys

Some form of Survey software may prove useful, but it does not have to be Google Forms, or Microsoft Forms or SurveyMonkey – it may be well be that LimeSurvey will do the job.

Videos

If the organisation creates video content they should be able to decide whether to pay to host it, and allow others to view it without advertising, or to have someone else host it for ‘free’ paid for by advertising, which may not align with their ideals.

Note that, probably, this is not a large a risk as it might seem. Although a Temperance Society might in theory find it’s videos interrupted by advertisements for alcoholic beverages this would not be an effective use of the advertiser’s spend.

It is still an area where groups should have more choice about whether to host their own video content, and being able to run Peertube on their own server would allow this. This also allows the ability to publish content only available to members, should they want, and to live stream meetings.

Chat/Instant messaging

There are a number of options for this, depending on requirements. Some of them keep a permanent record of everything which has been said, such as Matrix, which might be wanted for important decisions, but overkill for general chat. The established standard in this area is XMPP, a Federated chat protocol which was the basis for Facebook Messenger and Google Talk before they decided to only allow it be used within their own communities. It can, but does not have too, keep a record of chats on the server.

Social media (microblogs)

Some organisations may want to produce small snippets of information, similar to Tweets, intended for public consumption. They may also want their members to be able to do this, but may want to distinguish between an official view and member’s opinions. Software based around the ActivityPub standard works for this.

Social networking

Some groups may want members to be able to create small amounts of content primarily for sharing with friends, for which something like Diaspora may be more appropriate.

Calendars and events

People will probably want to know when the next meeting is and similar needs. Organisations can host their own calendars and do not need to Google or Microsoft to host them, which means that they do not have to require their members to have Google or Microsoft accounts.

These calendars can be added to smartphones or integrated into calendar programs on a PC, such as Thunderbird or Outlook, which saves members from having to add them manually.

Video conferencing/virtual meetings

Organisations should be able, if they wish, to run meetings and conferencing on systems they own and operate themselves, using a system such as Jitsi, or BigBlueButton (more suitable for a larger organisation).

Status

At present all of the components exist, and someone with an interest in computers can put forward such a system, as has been done at least in part for Debian and Wikipedia, but there is a scarcity of information making it simple for someone without computer skills to put such a system together.

Systems like FreedomBox have a similar aim, but targeted towards individuals hosting on their own hardware. Yunohost is also based on Debian, and is the closest I can find to a Small Organisation Server. The aspect I don’t know about is it’s stability across Debian upgrades. It’s installation instructions are still based on Debian version 10, whereas Debian’s stable release is now version 11, and I know the upgrade was fairly painless. Their Use Cases for NGOs is quite similar to this post.

Some small social organisations exist naturally in a tree, even if they largely operate independently. For example scout troups, guide companies, Phab clubs, some churches and so on. In these cases the activity the organisation is known for, such as bring people of all abilities to come together on equal terms, in the case of Phab clubs.

Oxford Phab club is one of about 140 clubs in England and Wales which is affiliated to the national Phab organisation, which has a Domain Name of phab.org.uk, whereas Oxford Phab has registered a Domain Name of oxfordphab.org.uk, and those other Phab clubs which do have a presence on the internet all have individually registered Doman Names, some of which contain the word phab.

Large companies have no excuse, but in many many cases the parent organisation is actually small, often less than a dozen people, and do not have the kind of systems administrator needed at present to deal with such matters. Making DNS delegation simpler to manage, while retaining flexibility is a valuable goal. For example when a Phab club affiliates to the national body it should be possible to that club to be offered a delegated DNS zone for its use, so that that club could use, for example oxford.phab.org.uk for its web site, email, social media etc.

On the wider internet this explosion of names is not good for anybody. Companies spend huge amounts on building trust in their brand, and then dilute it by registering random domain names which happen to have their name somewhere in it, and are then disclaim any responsibility when their customers are scammed by going to bigcorpticket.example.com, when the ‘official’ site was bigcorptickets.example.com. No scammer can register tickets.bigcorp.example.com (I have used the example reserved domain because nobody can register under that, and any other short domain name is probably registered). Phishing attacks could be hugely reduced if more people understood the hierarchical nature of the DNS. See the Equifax section below for a real life example.

Domain delegation, being your own primary delegated domain and being a secondary for another small organisation are technical goals for a small organisation server, even if they will never be used by, for example the Ambridge Garden Club.

Trees and Trust – some examples

The UK National Health service is generally good at using nhs.uk as a top level domain, and web sites for real NHS facilities tend to end in .nhs.uk – for example https://ouh.nhs.uk/ is the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which works closely with Oxford University for research aspects. Genuine web sites about such research almost always have a form like https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/ – again Oxford University, and the UK academic community in general, understands the domain system.

This consistency is slightly diluted by some use of nhs.net, some some emails may end in @nhs.net, as well as those which end @nhs.uk, or @somedepartment.nhs.uk

NHS services are being outsourced, and diluting the brand, so some patient letters now come from @drdoctor.co.uk – an NHS private provider, but the patient letters are reached by clicking on a link from https://nhs.my (where the .my ending would suggest the services were being provided from Malaysia – possibly by the Ministry of Health Malaysia). As DrDoctor is being trusted with patient appointment information, they should have access to an nhs subdomain – only to be used for purposes under that contract, and if a URL shortening service really is needed, then, for example u.nhs.net is as short as tinyurl.com.

The 2017 Equifax data breach – not using the DNS tree

When Equifax, a company whose sole purpose is to be a holder of a large quantity of personal financial information, had a data breach, due to their failure to follow good practice in managing their computer systems. This was the 2017 Equifax data breach. Their reaction to the problem was made worse by their failure to understand the potential benefits of being a tree. They set up a new web site – www.equifaxsecurity2017.com, to consumers could find out if their data was at risk. To prove their identity to the web site, consumers had to provide some private information, their last name and the last six digits of their social security number. Knowledge of this was supposed to be enough for Equifax to tell which consumer you were.

The problem with this approach is that Equifax knew that they had set up this name, and so felt consumers should trust it with their personal information because it had Equifax in the name. A security researcher, Nick Sweeting, demonstrated the risks of this by creating a domain www.securityequifax2017.com – as a parody of the official Equifax one. Due to confusion between the site names the Equifax help desk was sending people to the fake site rather than their real one. As he, and anyone else who understands the internet, will try to explain; this could not happen if their web site had been called security2017.equifax.com – or any other name which ends in .equifax.com

There is more on the problems of proving identity on the internet at The Proof of Identity Problem.

Being your own tree

Even for a small organisation there are advantages to being aware of the tree-like structure of the DNS. Suppose, for example, that Ambridge Garden Club ran an email newsletter as a mailing list which club members, or any interested people could join. Creating a subdomain newsletter.ambridge-garden-club.org.uk would keep the email for the newsletter distinct from the email for club members themselves. For a medium sized organisation this could be out sourced to a bulk mail specialist, and this is more easily done if it has its own subdomain. For a small organisation, such as the Ambridge Garden Club it could be handled on their server by specialist list management software such as Sympa or Mailman.

Preparing for parenting

For a small organisation, setting out on the Internet for the first time, the thought that there may be child organisations which would benefit from a degree of independence may seem far away, but the decision about where you buy your DNS from may affect your ability to have children (in a DNS sense).

Quite a few popular DNS registrars (vendors) do not have a facility, through their web control panel, to facilitate delegating a subdomain.

When a tree based name might not be appropriate.

There can be a good reason for not using a subdomain. You might have a product or service which you hope will flourish and could become an independent entity. Sitting ‘under’ your main organisation name will make that harder.

Embedded brand names are usually a mistake.

If you see a domain name like equifaxsecurity2017.com which contains a name of a brand or company this is a strong indicator of trouble for that brand.

1. The name is owned by the company, and they do not understand how the internet works.
2. The name has been registered by criminals pretending to be that company, and want to dupe that companies customers. (or security researchers wanting to make a point)
3. The name was registered by a group of lawyers who are starting a class action against the company
4. The name was registered by an advocacy or consumer group who want to complain about you – a domain called yourbrandname-sucks is, unless you manufacture vacuum cleaners, unlikely to be complimentary.

If you are are a non technical person – or more importantly a group of people – as being social on your own is not much fun – and you are looking for a place on the Internet to get together your choices are pretty limited. Everybody in your group is probably on WhatsApp, and Facebook, and it is easy to set up free Zoom accounts, and then you only need somebody, or a couple of people to have a paid account and you are are all set.

If you want to avoid that route your choices are much more limited. In fact if you are not technical they are pretty much non-existent.

If you are purchasing a large piece of commercial software they often have an example user to show how things can be set up. For example OracleTutorial.com have the example of a “a global fictitious company that sells computer hardware including storage, motherboard, RAM, video card, and CPU.” This gives you an idea of their target market.

I will use the example of a small (say 20-50 members) Gardening Club. Suppose they want to chat, but some of their members do not have a smartphone, or for some other reason they do not want to use WhatsApp (this is a Gardening Club – software freedom, privacy and such like are less important to them than effective defenses against carrot fly, or whether to over-winter dahlias in the shed). There is a protocol called Jabber or XMPP, which has been around for a well over a decade, which does everything which is needed, but it has never really taken off in the ‘real’ world. One reason for that is that there is not much reward for running an XMPP server for public use. There have been several attempts at mass-XMPP – Google Talk used to be proper federated XMPP, Duck Duck Go had a free XMPP service, there are numerous free XMPP services which are not accepting new accounts.

There is a cost to running a service – somebody has to pay for the hosting, network use etc – and running one, free, as a business does not make sense, and generously offering the service to strangers will exhaust anybody’s resources. Our Gardening Club could – if they knew about it – go to https://account.conversations.im/domain/ and pay to have their XMPP hosted there, but if they also wanted to have a web site, for example using WordPress, they would have to go somewhere else.

If federated social media systems are to take off then our Gardening Club needs a simple recipe for what they can do, preferably go to a provider, pay a small, understandable fee (paid for out of their membership subscriptions, the same way they are now paying for their Zoom accounts) follow a simple set up process and get communicating.

The nearest to this route at the moment is probably hosting a FreedomBox on an virtual, or hosted real system on the internet, although their attention is more towards onion routing than onion sets. There is a community around FreedomBox, as there is around many of the other federated social media projects, but it is a technically oriented community.

If the barriers to entry for Federated Social Media systems are such that only people who are capable of, and have the inclination to, install their own system from scratch can participate then the main topic of the Fediverse will be itself, which is not a healthy state.

Our hypothetical Gardening Club, knitting group, model railway society, dentists association, primary school, needs tools built around their interests, which can federate and accommodate the keen gardener, communicating with her fellow dentists professionally, knitting and working on her model railway when the weather is not suitable for gardening, and making jam for her children’s primary school summer fair.