Goals

This server has a couple special considerations that make it a little bit different than many traditional webservers. Primarily it has to do with the maintenance patterns. Several people might be working on a page over the course of a semester and because most of the users are students, there will inevitably be several changes in maintainer over the life of a page. Also, the people collaborating on a site could have very little interaction with each other outside of their work on the pages.

There are a number of priorities that need to be balanced and they are ranked as follows:

• Security: The server that is hosting these pages should be as resistant as possible to attack. We live in an age where websites are defaced for many reasons and it is naive to assume that our pages will be unimportant enough to warrant the attentions of a vandal. Other computers at Tech have already been attacked and defaced so there is little reason to assume that we are any safer.

• Accessibility: This is the most difficult issue to balance against security. Because these pages are being maintained by people who are volunteering their valuable free time it is important that it is as easy as possible for them to access the information that they need and publish their pages.

• Accountability: With a distributed system like this with a variety of maintainers it is important to be able to track who did what, where and when. This is important not only for the laying of blame in base of a problem, but also identifying weak points in the system.

• Appropriate Communication: Many of the people working on this project will never see their coworkers in the course of their daily lives. It is important for them to be able to communicate whatever information is necessary for them to work productively. It is also important though not to provide them with too much information; if the energy required to be involved is too great then it will cause people to drop out. The goal is to give them enough to keep them interested and productive but not so much as to over exert them.