Today had a lackadaisical start with me working on getting Dawn of War:Winter Assault to work on my Mac (once it was fully patched seems to have started working, yay for no copy protection!) after doing a whole heap of disk swapping last night to get the base installed only to see it complain it couldn’t find a CD/DVD drive. After I installed the 1.50 patch it asked me if I wanted to start and for the first time it actually started the game without issues. I managed to load it up and play a quick game and fielded a call from my Mum before heading to work. I also added some projects to my list and categorised items, now on the todo list: an automated login key generator for Joomla! and a component to compliment the ban IP/address plugin. Now all I need is time!

The Kerberos keys that I had asked to be remade were ready for me by the time I got there. It took a bit of time to rebuild the different keytab files to support the vhost environment (need to merge the respective keytab files) but once that was done everything was working. Well, mostly working. Firefox on my Mac worked fine, Firefox on the Windows desktops I tried worked when they were configured (see http://grolmsnet.de/kerbtut/firefox.html for information on what you need to do to get Firefox to do negotiate), IE on most of the desktops worked fine however some installations weren’t getting SSO, all of the Citrix servers seem not to pass through authentication (they end up going in a weird loop where IE appears to keep loading the page) and Safari on my Mac doesn’t seem to want to play the game either. Perhaps I’ll sort that out over the next week or so but that consumed a reasonable amount of time going through and checking different IE versions and if they worked. The only machine not to play the game seems to be Firefox on my Linux desktop (it should be working) so I’ll have a look at the ones that don’t work and why they don’t want to work. For the Windows boxes I have the feeling that the Netware client is causing issues (which would explain Citrix) so hopefully when our network eradicates Novell we’ll be fine.

And that leads us to the afternoon’s fun of building Joomla! 1.6’s backup system. I’ve managed to get the system to export the sample database, reimport it and then delete the files afterwards so I’ve moved onto much larger goals. I’ve taken one of our internal websites and I’m trying to get it to important. Suffice to say that it has enough data to cause an issue with the system. For data loading I’m using a heavily modified version of Alexey Ozerov’s “BigDump” script, which has been used in the past in a less modified form for the Joomla! 1.5 migrator. It is slowly being converted to use the new Tasks system in 1.6 which is another concept borrowed from the 1.0 migrator. The Tasks system in 1.6 has two items: a task set which is a container for individual tasks. So considering backups, one task set might be a full backup run of the site with individual tasks being an SQL backup, a file backup (tar archive perhaps?) and maybe copying that to a remote FTP site or similar. So the one task set would have an “SQL backup” task and a “file backup” task. Extension package installation may do a similar item as well splitting the install into different parts.

A new part of this is the data load system that provides functionality to read and load data files, at the moment only supporting SQL but I’m hoping I’ll be able to create a CSV one as well some luck, again probably reusing Alexey’s code in part here as well. I’m mostly through building parts of this system though I’m experiencing a strange issue with my sample data (hence why the updates haven’t been committed to J!’s SVN repository today) where it loads the file up through to almost 2000 queries and seems to stop suddenly. I’m not quite sure whats going on but I’m happy enough that the task system is picking up and storing values for it to progress as far as it does.

Another successful day spent on my Mac as well, NetBeans doesn’t seem to want to look at my project any more crashing instead of loading it which is disappointing but I’ll work that out another day. And now its time to enjoy some Dawn of War.

Today was a mostly ordinary day, though the day started with me buying Red Alert 3, so that wasn’t too bad – yay! Australia! A week behind the rest of the world! I could have pirated the game and had it faster and cheaper, perhaps even finished! But I digress, it was an ordinary day.

Today is Melbourne Cup day, being the first Tuesday of November, so we had a luncheon of sorts and a drawing for the horses. Didn’t win, the food was good, I’m $10 poorer and such is life.

I’ve been spending more time at work using my Mac as a primary machine. Since I’ve moved to Exchange from Domino (or Outlook from Notes), I’ve gotten Evolution on Linux mostly working (with the exception that it doesn’t automatically look up names for emails which is tedious) and Apple’s Mail and Address Book both playing nicely with Exchange. I do miss the fact that I had Notes on my Linux desktop and things mostly worked albeit slowly and consuming large amounts of memory, but it worked with all of the features available normally. Mail’s ability to due autocompletion is what is drawing me back to it as a client, which when you start writing emails is actually more useful than you would think. Its still not up to par with the Notes autocomplete which was quite cool and a lot more advanced than either Mail’s or Outlook’s (I get Outlook via Citrix).

I’ve also been trying out NetBean’s PHP Early Access through a nightly build (has the ability to create PHP projects from existing sources) and I’m impressed with it. I tried it out because I wanted to try out debugging with my PHP instance and the dated version of Eclipse I had (3.2) seems to have issues – more than likely my fault – and I don’t want to waste time on trying to fix something. NetBean’s installed and worked almost instantly, however it took me a while to find where I could change the params to get J! to route items properly. I managed to work out the bug that I was having without too much issue. I knew what it was but not where it was: turned out to be exactly what I thought, an assignment operator used instead of the append operator. The Subversion support seems to be a bit off and doesn’t work yet, so I’m not quite ready to ditch Eclipse yet – but I’ll try with later versions to see what I get.

I had a chat with the principal (we have principal, manager, director, CEO as our chain of command) about the projects that I’m doing and the ones I’m interested in so I’ll have to do some paperwork and business cases for the new projects and justify items. We’ve recently got a new manager who is trying to find where everything is so part of this is explaining everything so that he can get a grasp of the way the system works.

Then I spent the majority of the afternoon with one of the ITS guys working through how our Citrix boxes work with Flex profiles and the mandatory profiles filling in the gaps in his knowledge and how different parts of the system and why items might break or behave in a particular way. I think he’s worked out how it works and he’s even figured out why a few issues are happening. So nothing exciting but useful.

And finally I had fun with Kerberos. I built the Kerberos module on the SLES10 server, installed it, restarted Apache and tried to get it to work. On my Mac both Safari and Firefox requested a username and password instead of using a Kerberos token and IE6 in my Citrix session seemed to just go in a weird infinite loop. I slowly worked through my entire Kerberos configuration on the server until I got to looking at the keys. It turns out that the keys were created with the wrong virtual host name for the server which is causing the issues. The keys for the real server name actually worked fine when I got around to testing them which proves that everything will work once I get the keys. The last part is a fix to the Citrix system which for some reason think that the intranet site is actually on the internet, but I’m assured that this should be easy to achieve. Getting Kerberos up and running was pretty easy ignoring the faulty keys compared with some of the nightmares I’ve had getting items to play nicely together. I’ll probably add something to my guide (http://sammoffatt.com.au/jauthtools/Kerberos) on it, to help with items.

Who knows, I may have even figured this Kerberos thing out!

Today I was woken up by something that I haven’t been woken up to in a long time: very heavy rain. It isn’t often that it rains, and when it does it isn’t really that heavy, its usually quite soft or doesn’t last as long. Usually if it last for a reasonable period of time, its also quite soft, so it was quite interesting to have it go for so long and so heavy. Unfortunately I couldn’t sleep because it was too heavy (it woke me up to begin with), but it was nice to sit in bed and think about the rain and what it meant. It lasted about an hour or so and I left for Uni between breaks. It rained on and off throughout the day, though not as hard as it did in the morning. However, I bet none of it fell over the dams though but it’ll make my patch of dirt a lot greener.

Today was an interesting and rather long day of travel. Starting at 8am I begun my journey from small little Toowoomba (~100,000 people) to Munich (1.3million) with a few stops at small places like Brisbane (1.8million), Singpaore (4.5million) and London (7.3million in Greater London).

So by 10am I’d reached Brisbane International Airport, a bit early for the 2pm flight out on QANTAS to Singapore. After sitting around the airport for a while looking at things and trying to find power so that we could recharge the laptops we ended up boarding hte flight and had a rather uneventful flight from Brisbane to Singapore. The only thing of note was that the plane was perhaps the smallest of the whole lot and the inflight entertainment system’s personal LCD panels were very dark. It made it impossible to look at a movie or show that was very dark. Very bright colours are fine to watch however there were very little things there that would make it worth watching (chick flicks mostly).

Singapore was Singapore. Landed in the first terminal (along the C concourse) and wandered to get some rather horrible tasting coffee. This wasn’t the worst I’ve had however it is pretty much down there. It turns out that they have free wireless there and all you have to give over are some details so that the government can track you (normal if you’ve been in Singapore before). However I didn’t realise this until I walked past a sign (usefully facing the way towards the boarding gates behind a pillar) so I didn’t get much use of it. We’ll be spending a longer amount of time when we come back so that tied with the laptop access areas should make life a bit more bearable.

Then we lined up to board our plane to London (Heathrow). This wasn’t too bad until five minutes after the time that we were supposed to take off the captain announced that someone had been lost in the terminal. Eventually the person was decided to be permanantly lost and that in accordance with most airlines they were going to unload the baggage which takes about 20 minutes. Then it turned out that we needed to wait a further 45 minutes to get a free flight spot over Afghanistan (it would appear the airspace over Afghanistan is highly controlled by the Americans). During all of this the air conditioning system wasn’t functioning properly as it would in the air under full engine power, so whilst it was warm for me, I don’t think we quite got to the 28C that other parts of the plane got to (which was at the back and very hot). In the end, an hour and a half after we were supposed to depart we finally got up in the air. Great. This then delayed all of the meals and the like which ate into the sleeping time, however we managed to only be half an hour late. I got maybe three hours sleep on the flight before waking up at about midnight Munich local time – start of a long day.

London was mostly uneventful. Involved getting off in what really felt like a shed, wandering through very ‘regulated’ walk ways (had all sorts of nice barriers to remind you that you really are just cattle) down to the bus we needed to take to the new Terminal 5 (having landed in Terminal 4), which was about 20 minutes away.

Terminal 5 is the newest terminal and is very shiny and nice looking at the moment. We wandered up through the terminal, passing the customary security checks and made our way to Terminal 5b. For some silly reason we were required to take a small train (we waited longer for the train than the journey took, would have been able to walk it faster if there was the option) under the tarmac to the building opposite which stands alone and is a building surrounded completely by gates. Fortunately there was a coffee shop there that I got a massive cappuccino (more than I’m used to in Australia) before we boarded the next flight to Munich.

This next flight wasn’t so bad, an hour and a half flight and we managed to get off the ground early and into Munich early (score!). Now Munich was an interesting airport. It is perhaps the easiest airport I have come through in the world. I didn’t need to fill in any entry documentation at all, the guy merely looked at my passport, stamped it and I went to baggage control. From there I collected baggage and walked straight out the door. Everywhere else in the world I have to at least fill in some form or another however not here. It really felt too easy and not right (it’ll be harder to get back into Australia).

From here we managed to find a train (and work out how to get the ticket stamped) into town (~50 minutes), then onto the subway (~5min) and then walk to the hotel (~10min) to check in. Once checked in (and with a quick change) we continued life around Munich with some of the rest of the crowd including lunch, some sightseeing (really killing time before dinner) and dinner.

And evreything here is green.

Long day!

So a few months back we released Joomla! 1.5 which is really cool however like everything people are taking a while to upgrade. For a lot of people this is a problem bcause some components they want to use aren’t quite updated for 1.5, don’t work 100% properly in 1.5’s legacy mode or just plain don’t work at all.

An example of this is Project Fork. It appears to mostly work in legacy mode but it doesn’t like the users. The reason for this is a query that is silently failing which means that it can’t load users. The fix is available from the following location: http://pasamio.com/downloads/projectfork_controlpanelfix.zip. You can apply it by downloading the zip file and extract the controlpanel.class.php file to the /administrator/components/com_hydra/classes directory and overwriting the existing file that is there (you might want to have a copy of that first). This should fix up the user system for Project Fork in 1.5 when accessed from the control panel.

Hopefully this helps someone out 😉

Over the last two weeks I’ve had lots of experience and fun with Citrix and have managed to learn more about Citrix, Windows, Flex and mandatory profiles. I’ve managed to play with all sorts of interesting toys and problems since I’ve had to play with this, and all of it coming from the guy who has a full time Linux desktop and a Mac (very fond of my Mac). We’re amalgamating and all of the other shires (maybe 200 people) don’t really want to move away from their near and dear Outlook client nor do they seem very co-operative for much else. So we end up having to provide them with Outlook instead of Notes.

What we have been trying to do rather unsuccessfully is get IBM’s Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook to play nicely together with everything, including the Hummingbird DM extensions for Outlook. We’ve tried every combination of settings and a few versions of DAMO to get things to play nicely and it really isn’t.

Initially we had some success with getting DAMO to work nicely with Outlook. It takes us a lot of effort to get a user set up with both DAMO, Outlook and their Domino/Notes ID file. We had to go through manually for each user and set them up, however we didn’t get that far.

We next tested to see if the DM extensions were going to play nicely with everything. We found that the DM extensions worked well but DAMO ended up not working at all. We tried this in both our Citrix test environment and then within a Windows XP machine. Simply put, it didn’t want to fly.

So we went for the next best option, which was setting up Scalix profiles. We had the same MAPI profile set up for each user and configuration but it wasn’t as bad as the process we had to go through with DAMO (that is one nasty piece of work). We were running with a trial of Scalix and put it into our training environment to get an idea of the way it would behave when you threw some real load at it. Then we discovered that we couldn’t only have a limited number of premium clients and ended up swapping users around in training to try and get a realistic picture of things. We also did some numbers on Scalix versus Exchange, because that is what our last options were looking like and it started look like in the long term Scalix was going to cost more over Exchange. Plus we found this really nice looking tool that will make integrating the two possible which could provide us even more features over the Scalix solution (this might solve integrated calendars that Scalix wasn’t going to give us, but DAMO would).

So now, after a few weeks of trying DAMO and Scalix we’ve gone for an Exchange solution that might be able to get us out of the water and those who don’t want to learn anything new (or understand for that matter) with Outlook…and mostly everyone is happy.

Its interesting to see what tools and environments give you the skills and knowledge to apply to different circumstances. Today I had someone ask me a question: how do I have a unique number against multiple databases in a system across multiple sessions in Kettle. The Kettle sequence generator by default isn’t able to be altered via params which means it starts from zero for each one, which isn’t what we really wanted. The solution was something simple: use postgres. PostgreSQL isn’t my most favourite database, its complete with lots of nice little traps for new users and I always forget the traps each time I set it up. I kid you not, it annoys me no end all of the little things I have to change to get PostgreSQL to work in the same fashion as MySQL. Its just that I don’t use it enough though its still more work. In any case, we created our sequence generator in PostgreSQL and connected it up to Kettle and the thing worked perfectly (once I got postgres listening on the right interface, gave the remote server access to connect and fixed up the permissions). Beyond that today was filled with not a lot else that was interesting, more PHP work, fun with ASP systems that nobody knows anything about and building my filesystem and crashing things.

I’m going to start regularly writing daily posts about what I did today and the things I found interesting, I’ll at least try anyway.

First up for today is a personal thing, I completed a rather largish Uni assignment today which reminded me of all of the pains that come with C++, but to follow that I returned to working on my filesystem in C, which is just more pain. I got a quick response back, and almost full marks (96%) so I’m happy for all of the time I put in to get it done and how its probably far more complicated than anything else that will be submitted (it used Boost Signals and a whole heap of other things that I don’t think will ever be taught in the subject for a long time). But hey, thats just Uni!

Today I finally managed to get Pentaho, some business intelligence (BI) software, to play nicely with Novell eDirectory’s LDAP interface. I must have missed the option, but Pentaho doesn’t seem to accept anonymous binding to the LDAP server, which means I need to bind as a user. By default our users funnily enough have less access than the anonymous account (which is actually a proxy account with full browse permissions). The solution was simple enough: we shunted our dummy Pentaho user into the same group as the anonymous proxy account and everything worked. So I’ve now got Pentaho using LDAP for authentication (yay!) and a MySQL database to get its role/group permissions. Funnily enough when its all said and done the documentation is pretty close to the mark.

But once I had that I don’t have an ability to manage the groups/roles within Pentaho, so I end up having to write some small PHP to manage that. Luckily I worked on a project a while back that I called “Joomla! Central Management for Users” which basically connected directly to MySQL databases of Joomla! installs and altered the users. I had originally built it with a plugin infrastructure in mind so that I could plug other stuff into it later. Starting this morning it only had a ‘connector’ for Joomla! 1.0 via MySQL and LDAP, now it has one for the Pentaho security tables. This means I can easily copy users from LDAP or Joomla! into Pentaho without too much issues and has a debugged user interface already. But wait theres more!

When I was originally developing the tool I wrote a query language for it. See, SQL is a great language for databases, but its a bit hard to apply in situations where you don’t quite need all of that power. So I wrote my own query language. Its quite simple it can validate simple attributes and allows for set operations within “Sites” (a site is a container for users and groups). So for example I want to see all of the users who are on our web site but not in our LDAP directory:
existsin “Web Sites” and not existsin “LDAP”

Primitive sure, but it because writing a large SQL expression for something simple. I hope to expand on it, but it already does what it needs to do for the time being.

So I’ve covered query languages, LDAP and BI! All I need now is the filesystem news. Today there was a whole heap of fan fare on Slashdot about the ZFS news from Apple, whilst thats cool and all (especially since I don’t mind Apple’s UI), I personally have my own filesystem that I’ve gotten back into to do some work on. It also happens to be a Uni assignment due on Friday! So I’ll be back to working on that and hopefully I’ll have it to a nice stage that I can do some lightening talks at linux.conf.au!

I’m sitting in my Oracle prac at the moment and I’ve had two shocks: Vista actually fixed a problem with XP and my Business faculty based lecturer is heavily bagging out WebCT and hoping for Moodle to come in. I’m not quite sure where all of this support for Moodle came from in the University but it is exciting…shame it may not happen in my time. The ITS people have been suspicious of the software over WebCT and one of the reasons why WebCT is being scrapped is that it costs money for the Uni and the Uni is running out of money. Interesting times ahead, shame I probably won’t see it come to fruition.

So this is my new blog. Its a WordPress site as you can probably gather. I haven’t done much to customize it though I must admit I’m a fan of the default template anyway.

Stay tuned to read some of my experiences with technology and the world.

Sam