Author: Dexter Chua

The SRCF has recently been plagued by a variety of hardware issues. To keep an eye on our services, we employ a variety of monitoring software such as Icinga and Munin. Monitoring is only useful if we get notified when we encounter problems. In the past, we relied on email and SMS notifications. For better or for worse, some of the sysadmins check IRC more frequently than their email. Recently, we started making Icinga and Munin send their notifications to a dedicated IRC channel: #alerts:irc.srcf.net.

As announced in the previous blog post, the SRCF just launched a new mattermost instance. Mattermost runs on an open-core model, with an open-sourced free tier and paid “enterprise” feature. Being a student-run society, we went with the free tier, officially known as “Team Edition”. The Team Edition lacks some access control features that would be useful for us. After numerous failed attempts to do access control the “right” way, we decided to intercept Mattermost’s API calls at nginx via lua-nginx-module to run our own authentication logic before passing them on to Mattermost. At the end, we get more refined permission controls that we would have had with Enterprise edition.

The SRCF is excited to announce its most recent addition to its arsenal of services. We’ve officially launched our Mattermost service, an open-core team communication tool, designed to be an alternative to Slack and MS Teams. Any member of the University can sign up for free and create a team for their group or society.

In this blog post, I will discuss how the SRCF recently hardened the control panel against cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. These attacks allow malicious sites to perform actions in the control panel on your behalf.

There have been many exciting SRCF projects recently, the most prominent of which is Timeout, a video conferencing platform that Matias will tell you all about later. In the meantime, we decided to start a blog to share our sysadmin experiences. The goal is to give our users some insight into what we do, and hopefully attract some of them to join us in the future. Moreover, we hope that documenting our experiences can be helpful for other people intending to deploy similar systems.