
What is WASPII?
WASPII is the enhanced
version of ASPII; a subscription based mail
announcement system; originally developed by Martin
Kretzmann (Email: martin@plebius.org ).
ASPII is a mail
distribution system, which originally maintained a
subscriber database (we call it "a list" in
resemblence to mailing lists) , and the list
administrator could send mail to all subscribers.
Subscibers can also unsubscribe themselves by a
simple web interface; as well as new people can
subscribe themselves to the ASPII list, again over
the web.
WASPII, is enhanced
ASPII and the enhancements are:
- The system can
now maintain unlimited number of announcement
lists;
- All
administration (including creating new lists
and obliterating useless ones) can be now
done through the web;
- Different types
of administration authority schemes are
available;
- Some useful tools
for the administrator(s) are now available;
Who is WASPII for?
WASPII is basically an
e-mai lannouncement system. It is somewhat similar to
regular mailing lists (like those managed by
Majordomo or Listserve) but with WASPII the mail
trafiic is one-way!
WASPII works like
this:
- Some
administrator creates a new list; say -
CONCERT ANNOUNCEMENTS LIST.
- The administrator
decides whether he/she should allow people
subscribing to this list over the web. Public
subscription may not be desirable for a
private list).
- The administrator
decides whether he/she should allow people to
unsubscribe themselves over the net. If the
announcement list is established to address
the students taking a particular course, the
administrator (probably the course
instructor) might not want any students to
miss an important exam rescheduling
announcement.
- The administrator
subscribes a set of e-mail addresses to
his/her new list and starts sending them
announcement mail (selectively or to the
whole bunch). If permitted, users can remove
their email addresses from the list's
database and/or add themselves to other
lists' databases (if allowed, of course).
So, to wrap up things,
if you are in a position where you frequently need to
send announcement e-mail messages to various groups
of people and UNIX mail aliases facility is not
perfectly suiting you; you should try WASPII. (My problems with UNIX mail aliases).
I, myself, am in such
a position. I frequently need sending e-mail
announcements to different groups of people (like
"CS201 students", "EE Undergrad
students", "CS Faculty", "Admin
Staff" etc.) and UNIX "mail aliases"
feature is not that easy to maintain. Majordomo and
similar mailing lists is not what I really need
because I want one-way mail traffic; i.e. the
subscribers should not be able to send messages to my
announcements lists.
In my pursuit of a
proper tool for my needsi I came across ASPII,
written by Martin Kretzmann and distrbuted under GNU
license. I liked his code ( ASPII is written in PERL;
and so is WASPII) and decided to tailor it to suit my
needs. What I ended up with is WASPII. It is free!
Enjoy!
System
Requirements
You need
a system on your institution's TCP/IP network capable
of providing a web service and running PERL. Although
a very wide platform base can qualify for these, I
strongly recommend a UNIX or LINUX based system;
afterall UNIX and LINUX are the best systems to run a
TCP/IP service on.
You might
need root access; or at least sufficient rights to
create files and directories under the httpd root
(the directory where all web related files are
located on a web server). WASPII is developed and in
use now on a 166 MHz Pentium PC running LINUX (RedHat
6.1 distribution) and Apache HTTP server version 1.3.
I don't see any reason why it shouldn't run in
harmony with another HTTP server. The system also has
PERL version 5.005_03. Any PERL V5.x should work.
Requirements
Summary:
- UNIX or LINUX,
- Apache HTTP
Server,
- PERL 5.x.
Installation
Installation
of WASPII is fairly easy. You do not need to have an
in-depth knowledge of UNIX and/or PERL or your HTTP
server. You should, however, have sufficient idea
about the HTTP structure on your object server. You
might need some help from the system administrator or
the webmaster.
If you
follow the installation steps carefully, your WASPII
service should be up and running in at most half an
hour. Good luck.
Installation
Steps:
Download
WASPII to /tmp or other world writable
temporary area on your system;
- WASPII
modules in simple tar format (waspii.tar
yyy KBytes)
untar,
unzip to a temporary directory (preferably to
/tmp). You can use the UNIX commands
%
cd /tmp
% tar xvf waspii.tar
to untar
the packed file.
You
will have two new directores under /tmp;
waspii-html and waspii-cgi. You will need to move the
contents of these directories to appropriate
locations. You need to learn two things
before you proceed:
The location of http document root for the
web services provided on the system you are
working on and the CGI path. If you are the
system administrator, you should know these.
If you are not, you can ask the system
administrator for some help. If you are using
a RedHat LINUX system, the http document root
will probably be "/home/http/html"
and the CGI path will be
"/home/httpd/cgi-bin". Please note
that creating these directories if they don't
exist will not do any good.
Move
the waspii-html directory to your http
document root. (You might need root or
webmaster access rights to do this. If you
can do the following with any user identity,
your system is extremely vulnerable and
should be immediately fixed).
A command like the following should do the
job:
%
su
# mv /tmp/waspii-html /home/httpd/html/waspii
Change
the ownership of all files under the
html/waspii directory to "nobody".
(actually you should change the ownership to
the identity of the httpd daemon; which is
almost always "nobody").
A command like this should do the work:
#
chown -R nobody:nobody
/home/httpd/html/waspii
Move
the waspii-cgi directory to your CGI path.
(You might need root or webmaster access
rights to do this
A command like the following should do the
job:
#
mv /tmp/waspii-cgi /home/httpd/cgi-bin/waspii
Change
the ownership of all files under the
cgi-bin/waspii directory to
"nobody". (actually you should
change the ownership to the identity of the
httpd daemon; which is almost always
"nobody").
A command like this should do the work:
#
chown -R nobody:nobody
/home/httpd/cgi-bin/waspii
Note
: You can do these by simply copying files around
but please note that there are some dotted files
in these waspii-html and waspii-cgi directories
and you must make sure that they are copied too!.
Now
you should have a dierctory structure which
should look like:
/
|
|__ home
|__ httpd
|__ htdocs
| |__ (old_stuff)
| |__ waspii
| |__ creating2.htm
| |__ images
| |__ add.gif
| |__ bluearr.gif
| |__ etc.
| |__ lists.htm
| |__ weblogo2.gif
|__ cgi-bin
|__ (old-stuff)
|__ waspii
|__ .hosts.admin
|__ TEMPLATE
|__ add2db.cgi
|__ admin
|__ etc.
|__ admin.cgi
|__ batchsubs.pl
|__ etc.
All
files and directories under and including the
waspii directories /home/httpd/html/waspii and
/home/httpd/cgi-bin/waspii should be owned by
nobody:nobody.
Now
you have to edit a couple of files:
Edit
/home/httpd/html/creating2.htm as suggested in
the files with some HTML comment lines:
Change the image file name to the name of the logo gif image you want.
Do not forget to put your logo image file into the same directory.
<!--------------- EDIT THE FOLLOWING LINE AND CHANGE ---------->
<!--------------- THE GIF FILE'S NAME TO YOUR LOGO GIF -------->
<img src="weblogo2.gif">
<!--------------- REMOVE THESE COMMENTS WHEN YOU ARE DONE --->
Change the http directive to include your web servers fully qualified domain name
and path to waspii cgi files. DO NOT CHANGE THE "METHOD" AND "NAME"
PARAMETERS!
<!--------------- EDIT THE FOLLOWING LINE AND REPLACE --------->
<!--------------- THE HTTP HOST NAME, CGI PATH AND ---------->
<!--------------- WASPII DIRECTORY ---------->
<!--------------- DO NOT CHANGE method AND name -------------->
<form action="http://hostname.domain.edu/cgi-bin/waspii/create.cgi"
method="POST" name="myform">
<!--------------- NOTHING TO MODIFY BELOW THIS POINT ---------->
<!--------------- UNLESS YOU WANT TO CHANGE THE WAY ---------->
<!--------------- FORM LOOKS. ---------->
<!--------------- REMOVE THESE COMMENTS WHEN YOU ARE DONE ----->
When you are done with the editing, you can remove the HTML comment lines.
Next file to edit is: /home/httpd/cgi-bin/waspii/.hosts.admin
You must enter the IP addresses of the master administrator client(s) into this file;
one line for each IP. You can type in comments at the end of each line starting with
a #.
People using the WASPII system from computers with IP addresses listed in this
file will have full administrative rights on ALL the waspii lists. Best practice is
putting only one IP address (your IP address) in this file. Partial IP block
addresses are allowed; i.e you can type "139.179." as an IP addr in this file,
meaning all clients with IP addresses starting with 139.179. will have master
administrative rights; but I do not recommend this.
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