Transfer cloudflare management

[walshbr]

Break off of #1761 - @ZoeLeBlanc needs to reach out to GMU to transfer cloudflare management off of Matt's account now that he's left the team.

[acrymble]

I've just spoken to GMU's web admin person and they claim not to have any access to this. I can only assume that this is Matt's personal account. @ZoeLeBlanc can you please attend to this? I can't proceed with #2148 Email Adddress for @Anisa-ProgHist until we have access to this Cloudflare account to verify we actually own our domain.

[drjwbaker]

This was done in January. Someone associated the PH gmail with Cloudflare. Those with access, search the gmail account.

[drjwbaker]

(25 Jan to be specific)

[acrymble]

If that's the case then this ticket should be closed and we need the Service Integrations page updated so I know who I can contact to help me with Cloudflare: https://github.com/programminghistorian/jekyll/wiki/Service-Integrations

Can someone on the @programminghistorian/technical-team please make this update?

[ZoeLeBlanc]

We didn't close the cloudflare ticket because I hadn't done the DNS servers yet I thought (honestly can't remember at the moment since I'm in the middle of packing my house to move Thursday). I can close this ticket and make a new one for the DNS issue specifically if that makes the most sense.

[drjwbaker]

Good luck with the move @ZoeLeBlanc (I hate moving house, you have my sympathies). If you need to get into the gmail again and run into two-factor authentication issues, let me know and we can resolve this over a quick call.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Thanks @drjwbaker !! Turns out I still have access to both gmail and cloudflare so should be good for now 🤞🏽

[anisa-hawes]

Hello @programminghistorian/technical-team. I'm really keen to get my PH gmail address set up, so I can join the Google Group, manage new members, and set up a work calendar. Reading through this thread as well as #1761, I understand that our domain is managed via Cloudflare and that there have been some complexities involved in transferring the DNS admins over. Is there any update? Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help resolve and close this issue. Thank you ✨

[acrymble]

@ZoeLeBlanc @anisa-hawes can you both please set up a zoom meeting to work through this together? It's a major sticking point on a number of tickets and the documentation we've got doesn't make it clear what has and hasn't yet been done so no one else can step in.

[anisa-hawes]

Thank you, @acrymble. Zoe and I are meeting this Friday 8th October to work through this.

[acrymble]

@ZoeLeBlanc this seems still to be stuck. I'm not sure what the problem is, but can we try fully transferring this to a new account that's owned by the project instead of linked to a personal account? At the moment I don't think anyone can even go in and look to figure out what needs to happen. And that's the big problem with the current setup.

There are a number of workflows we want to simplify and improve, including linking more passwords to a Programming Historian shared email account. And we can't do any of that work until we can resolve this issue.

Can you give us a plan, timeline, or ask for help please?

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Agree with all your points @acrymble Adam and definitely asking for help here!! I don't know much of anything about DNS or cloudflare so I'm pretty much flying blind.

Today I tried to add programminghistorian.org to our cloudflare account and got this message. Do we know who has our administrator for the DNS? Also do we want to transfer ownership of the domain name?

Thanks for all your help and happy to chat more via email/slack too if that's easier!!

[acrymble]

Thre's very limited documentation on the wiki about this, which is partly why this is so difficult. But I think Matt is still the owner.

It would be great if Programming Historian fully controlled this so we don't have this problem again in future.

[anisa-hawes]

Thank you, @ZoeLeBlanc! From the notes on our Service Integrations, it seems like the Domain Name is maintained by colleagues at George Mason University.

>>
maintained by: Jessica Otis jotis2@gmu.edu. If contact required, email Jessica cc'ing chnm@gmu.edu (center administrator) or webmaster@chnm.gmu.edu (systems administrator).

[drjwbaker]

GMU offer this service as an IPP, and Jessica confirmed relatively recently that they are our contact point for web hosting, so they shouldn't be surprised by an email from PH.

[anisa-hawes]

For Cloudflare, the notes indicate that we'd need to ask Matt to remove programminghistorian.org from his Cloudflare account, allowing a new admin (our shared Gmail?) to add it to our account.

[acrymble]

I contacted the George Mason team back in July about this and they already responded that they don't control this:

The domain is registered with us but the nameserver is on Cloudflare which we don't have access to. The domain was registered on domain.com but the name is configured to point to an account on Cloudflare. Does anyone on your team have access to the Cloudflare account? My guess is that the website is hosted there as well.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Thanks for all of this @acrymble @anisa-hawes and @drjwbaker 🙏🏽 ! I just messaged Matt on twitter to see if he has time to chat about this and see if we can set up a time to get this migrated over from his account. I'll update here once I hear back from him and fingers crossed we can get this sorted sooner than later 🤞🏽

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Matt and I are going to meet next week on Wednesday! I'll add any updates or remaining issues here but hoping that we can do the transfer then and have it sorted going forward 🥳

[acrymble]

Hi @ZoeLeBlanc is this now resolved?

[anisa-hawes]

Happy New Year, @ZoeLeBlanc!

Did you have an opportunity to talk this through with Matt in the end?
Let me know if there's anything I can help with to move this forwards.

Thank you,
Anisa

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Hi @acrymble feel free to just tag me here since I'm the one it sounds like you're annoyed with. Unfortunately I have a full time job and the onboarding to be tech team lead was pretty steep so this fell between the cracks. Absolutely mea culpa and I do apologize, but also want to be sure that you know the team isn't purposefully ignoring this, but instead dealing with many other time consuming issues, like training editors and paid employees or rebuilding the site. If you want to revisit the tech team remit or my involvement/leadership of the team, absolutely happy to do so, though perhaps that should be a one-one-one conversation. Just let me know!

Anyways I didn't see @hawc2 response earlier but happy to have you help on this issue Alex. It essentially involves emailing the people at CMU (who are listed under our cloudflare service integration) and walking through the steps in the link I posted above for setting up a custom domain name. If you don't feel fully comfortable taking this on Alex, it was on my to do list for tomorrow morning. Just let me know and thanks for offering to help!

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Alrighty looks like I'll be meeting this week with GMU person to have our domain pointing towards Github servers. After that we should no longer need cloudflare since we'll be able to use Github to enforce HTTPS.

There is a separate issue of custom emails. Since we were never hosting our site with cloudflare, we could never use them for email hosting regardless, and while we could use them for email routing, it seems like that service is still in beta and would require us registering our domain with cloudflare (more info here https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/).

So the big question is if we can setup a google workspace like we outlined in #2148 via GMU or if we need to use a separate service (like maybe outlined here https://www.kristasimmons.io/blog/custom-email-domain-github-pages/ ... though they still list needing to update the MX records). Hypothetically we should be able to add the MX records to our GMU registrar but it sounds like from @acrymble experience that they said this is impossible?

I'm wondering if we need to have a conversation about moving our domain name off of GMU, since my understanding (though can't stress how much I don't know about this stuff) is that this should be trivially easy.

To give an example of how easy, this is where I register my domain name and adding the MX files is just clicking a dropdown and entering the correct values. Anyways I'll try and see if it's possible to add these MX fields when I meet with the GMU person but if not, might be worth moving our domain over to a service we can access directly.

[acrymble]

Thanks @ZoeLeBlanc. I think we should move the domain to our own control, as this is obviously just extra complexity we don't need (in order to save $10 per year, which we readily have).

[drjwbaker]

Thanks for the proposal Zoe. I agree with @acrymble: we should heartily thank GMU for their support over the years, but given the potential admin involved as we grow, move to our own domain, with credentials linked to the shared gmail. I can support the billing side of this.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Awesome! Thanks for the input @acrymble and @drjwbaker ! Strongly agree this is the correct way to move forward, so going to follow up with GMU (still haven't heard back) and see if we can just transfer it to a new domain service. Does anyone @programminghistorian/technical-team have a favorite service they use? We won't be hosting at all or needing SSL or HTTPS, so it seems like all of them are pretty much identical as far as I can tell, but would appreciate any advice 🙌🏽

[drjwbaker]

Re choices, I have a preference for something with many different payment options. If you recall, I pay for netlify out of my personal account, and then get the money back from the Ltd, because netlify has restricted options.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Ohh can you say more about what you mean by different payment options? I'm thinking this might be a good option since we want to use google email https://domains.google/, but I realize I don't know if this would present issues with paying from the UK or not 🤔

[hawc2]

Have you all looked into Google Workspace for nonprofits?: https://www.google.com/nonprofits/offerings/workspace/

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Thanks @hawc2 ! I believe that was the desired outcome from #2148 so part of why I recommended domains.goggle 😊 . Have you used it before or google workspaces?

[hawc2]

I tried to get access to Google Workspace discounts for non-profits for the Philly Community Wireless project but since we aren't a technically a nonprofit (we have a fiscal sponsor), we couldn't get the discount. We were able to get access to Tech Soup discounts, which are also worth looking into. Applying for the Google Workspace discount doesn't take long, they pretty quickly help you figure out if you're eligible.

…

On Wed, 2 Feb 2022 at 12:48, Zoe LeBlanc ***@***.***> wrote: Thanks @hawc2 <https://github.com/hawc2> ! I believe that was the desired outcome from #2148 <#2148> so part of why I recommended domains.goggle 😊 . Have you used it before or google workspaces? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1981 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADXF4EE3IY3RMNJXWEH5IQDUZFVABANCNFSM4WBM5J3A> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

-- *Alex Wermer-Colan, PhD * *Digital Scholarship Coordinator* *Temple University, Scholars Studio*

[anisa-hawes]

Hello all. I've just been reading the notes at https://www.google.com/nonprofits/eligibility/. It sounds as though we would meet the requirements. Do you want me to see if I can get started with the request?

[drjwbaker]

Especially if we can use the shared gmail we have, merging this with that.

[drjwbaker]

(on payments options, should we need it, ideally we'd pay an invoice or via paypal rather than, say, putting in the details on a bank card, because we don't have a bank card, just a bank account)

[acrymble]

(on payments options, should we need it, ideally we'd pay an invoice or via paypal rather than, say, putting in the details on a bank card, because we don't have a bank card, just a bank account)

@drjwbaker is it easier for you to pick one that suits your payment needs? That might be faster. I assume they're all generic at this stage?

[drjwbaker]

Thanks for thinking of me @acrymble. It would merely.y be good to see options (if we can't get the Google non-profit thing) from which I can advise on what would be easier for the Ltd (which won't take a minute to investigate). The admin should be able to adjust to fit, I just would rather not have another netlify situation.

[acrymble]

@anisa-hawes can you try to sign us up for the Google nonprofit thing and let us know where any snags occur?

@ZoeLeBlanc is the cloudflare matter now resolved? If so can you please update this page with the new info: https://github.com/programminghistorian/jekyll/wiki/Service-Integrations#cloudflare

[ZoeLeBlanc]

@acrymble still waiting for GMU to transfer the domain to us so until that happens cloudflare, emails, etc... will be waiting. Just FYI when we do transfer the domain there may be some time while the site is down (though I'm hoping to avoid it or at most be an hour or so). We are going to not only be changing our hosting but also updating our Github servers so might just take awhile for everything to propagate fully. I'll post here once I hear back from GMU

[jenniferisasi]

@ZoeLeBlanc I am going to keep an eye for this. Whenever it happens if you ping me on Slack either @anisa-hawes or I can tweet about the page being down for a bit.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Small but consequential update. @drjwbaker and I formally initiated the transfer of our domain to google domains and (hopefully 🤞🏽 ) configured our DNS records. We still need to add in the MX records for the emails, but I'm planning to do that once the domain transfer is complete. Currently google says that the transfer will be complete by February 24 but if anyone has any issues accessing the site before then PLEASE ping me! We still need to configure HTTPS through Github so we may get secure access errors over the next few days.

[anisa-hawes]

Amazing! Thank you, @ZoeLeBlanc! ✨

[ZoeLeBlanc]

So excited to say that our domain is officially transferred and being served securely by github 🥳 !!! Final step is setting up the MX records for our emails but then we should be good to go.

Thanks @drjwbaker for all your help doing the transfer and super excited that I think we can finally close this ticket and also not use cloudflare any more 🙌🏽

[drjwbaker]

Huge thanks for guiding us through this @ZoeLeBlanc (not least as it wasn't your area of expertise!) If you need me again to do the MX bit, do say.

[acrymble]

Thank you @ZoeLeBlanc. As a final step for the future, can we add this to our documentation of service integrations, at least outlining who has login details (and making sure @anisa-hawes is one of those people) so we better know in future how to tackle things like this? https://github.com/programminghistorian/jekyll/wiki/Service-Integrations

The 'MX' bit is the step I need in order to prove to get the email address. But are we using Google to buy the domain? If so maybe I can skip the step?

[drjwbaker]

@acrymble It is all connected to the shared gmail, so if you have the password to that, you have the password to this (domains.google.com). But yes, this should be documented. On email, it is recommended we do the transfer before doing the email, hence the gap. I note @ZoeLeBlanc completed the transfer late into the evening (above and beyond for the cause!), so I'll pick up the next steps with her when she has the time.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Wondering if we can close this issue now? @acrymble @anisa-hawes I saw that you closed #2492 and so wondering if we still need to setup our email servers or if that's providing through the workspace? Just lmk and I'll add the MX records to our DNS records, otherwise I'll close this

[anisa-hawes]

Thank you, @ZoeLeBlanc! If you're able to add the MX records, then I think we can close this! I'm in the process of getting set up in the Google Workspace. At the moment, I'm able to send but not receive emails... Guessing this will be fixed when the MX records are added?

[ZoeLeBlanc]

@anisa-hawes thanks for the feedback. Just added the MX records but need someone with access to the admin gmail to do the steps listed here https://support.google.com/a/answer/140034?hl=en&ref_topic=2683820 starting with number 7. After that we should be good to go 🎉

[acrymble]

Thanks so much @ZoeLeBlanc the remaining steps were already done. I've logged into the email account and can confirm @anisa-hawes is now receiving emails. Over to you @anisa-hawes