Chapter 6. Undernets

Difficult-o-Meter: 2 (light Linux skill required)

Covers:

Apache 1.3.14	http://www.apache.org/
CVS 1.10.7	http://www.cvshome.org

Question: I've got a team of people who work scattered around the company. We need to share information and documents. Right now we are using a confusing mix of interoffice mailed paper documents, file-server-based file sharing, and various barely compatible groupware and e-mail products. How can Linux help me get to a single simple way to share information with my team? We have a corporate intranet, but there is a formal process to get anything on it and the intranet team controls the content. What can we do?

Answer: You can spend a lot of money on a proprietary groupware system like Lotus Notes. You can live with the long lead time from your intranet team. Or you go under the radar and implement your own Web server that you control, and you put all your team's stuff up there.

That last solution is the topic of this chapter. My co-authors and I like to think we coined the term undernet when we did this at HealthPartners in 1996, but a quick Web search showed us that other people have done this and called their systems undernets. Publish or perish, I guess.

The concept of undernets is an obvious one, and with the terms Internet, intranet, and extranet already taken, even the name is obvious. What else would you call a Web service set up by a small team for its own purposes and not linked to the rest of an organization's network strategy? Undernet is the obvious and cool choice.

In this chapter we will discuss some of the reasons to build an undernet, and we will show you how easy it is to set one up. We will even show you how to use some additional tools to make the maintenance and deployment of content as simple as possible.