Bobby Rockers – Page 15 – Survivor to Software

In a real dark night of the soul

I was amazed to find that when my blog went offline; people actually e-mailed me to ask when it would be back. I discovered more readers in the last few weeks than I was aware of in the last few years. Thanks everybody! I appreciate the kind words and comments.

The reason that I went down was due to the need to switch hosts to someone a little more…. well… sane. If anyone is in need of a good hosting service; I cannot speak well enough of Hostmonster.com! Oh, and if you have the options; stay away from iPowerWeb.

While I was fixing the website I updated the wine list with three new wines. Two reds and a wonderful white Riesling.

Surrender Hope all… wait, is that Snow?

I actually shed a tear yesterday. Jason accomplished what I thought would never happen. Liz (his beautiful and yet amazingly stubborn wife) went shooting for the first time. Though she had never before shot a gun, non of us doubted Liz’s shooting abilities. Mostly because I was already throughly convinced that she could kill any one of us, at any time, with anything she chose to use.

Hope you had a good time Liz! This finally proves, once and for all, that… “Guns don’t kill people. Liz kills people!”

Development Life-cycle Integration

Now that I can focus on more application development issues at work, it is time to start bringing up some of the open source life-cycle tools I need. Integrating the individual tools (MediaWiki, Bugzilla, Subversion, Mailman, WordPress, etc..) requires some work. This has proven to be a little different than my previous experience because we are an Active Directory shop. MS Active Directory actually uses a form of LDAP for authentication but it is different enough that each of the tools I use requires a little… playing… to get it working. Here are the important links:

–MediaWiki LDAP Authentication — Contains AD specific information in it’s section on configuration.
–MediaWiki WordPress Integration — Specific information on getting the very best wiki software and the best available blogging software talking to each other.
–Bugzilla/SVN/MediaWiki/Mailman Integration — A walk-though on getting magic identifiers on four of the most useful application development tools available. This functionally links Subversion, Bugzilla, MediaWiki, Mailman, ViewCV, Apache, MySQL, svnmailer, svn2cl, and Bonsai. I know of very few organizations that have such a complete set of development life-cycle tools. In addition you can add code auditing (via Codestriker), source tree monitoring (via Tinkderbox), automated developer/project statistics (via StatSVN), source code indexing (with LXR), and the list just goes on.
–MediaWiki Active Directory Integration — This is a forum post that I found useful in the AD process with MediaWiki.
–Bugzilla Option Additional Configuration — A subsection of The Bugzilla Guide. Provides support on setting up LDAP, patch viewing, persistent bug whining, dependency charts, and incident graphs.
–Integrating Bugzilla with Active Directory — THE setup information to get Bugzilla working with an Active Directory Tree.
–Scmbug Homepage — Scmbug is a tool to integrate software configuration management tools with bug tracking software (i.e. it connects tools like CVS and Subversion, with tools like Bugzilla and Mantis.)
–Subversion and Bugzilla integration with BugTraq and Scmbug — An example configuration by Platinum Solutions combining those four tools.
–WebSVN: Subversion repository broswer — Another Platinum Solutions document talking about WebSVN. WebSVN allows for web based browsing of repository data. It is different from a tool like ViewCV in that it supports Subversion authorization. WebSVN is not as advanced a tool as ViewCV but it’s native subversion authentication makes it a good fit in some places.
–Bugzilla accounts in Subversion with mod_auth_mysql — Platinum Solutions has another great article on setting up shared users between Bugzilla and Subversion. This is much easier then configuring my setup with Active Directory authentication.

The reality is that if you company is not doing re-time build tests, nightly builds, automated testing, bug tracking with integration into you source control management system, and automated reporting; then your company is waisting developers time and resources. Open Source has only been as successful as it has because of the plethora of automated tools available to them. Your competition is using them… you better be. There are hundreds of freely available software engineering tools in the Open Source world. Check out Tigris.org for a fairly complete list.

God loves us and loves to see us happy

I have updated the my wine list. New to the list are a couple of Cabernet Sauvignons and a wonderful Bordeaux.

Mail Server on OpenSuse

Quick link to a mail server install that I have been working on for a client. These are simply some notes on getting SMMP, cyrus-sasl, Postfix, and POP3 working with SSL. The information also includes creating public key certificates and signing them. The intended platform is OpenSuse 10.2

The notes are based on a HowToForge.net article titled The Perfect Setup: OpenSuSE 10.2.

cvs2svn cookbook

I have been converting some of my old cvs repositories to subversion with cvs2svn. It is a pretty handy little tool (even if it is fairly limited.) Here are a couple hints I had to figure out via trail and error.

Public and Private… Parts.

I constantly forget how to setup a shared key environment for OpenSSH. It is pretty easy to find a tutorial on The Linux Documentation Project or How-To Forge but why do that when I can just have one here for me to find. This is a quick-and-dirty example of generating public and private keys, using shared-key authentication, and configuring an SSH agent. Eventually I will write a kde-agent so you don’t have to use the gnome one… but that is for another post.

The Future as History

The Last Question (TLQ) is a short story by one my favorite authors of all time. Isaac Asimov has a talent for writing fiction about the future that reads like a historical novel. Out of the several thousand works by Asimov, TLQ was his favorite. In addition, TQL is probably the best example of his writing style; a style where the plot is driven not by the characters or the color of his writing, but by the very ideas woven through his themes. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do.

JBoss and OpenSuse

JBoss is the worlds most popular (and least complex) J2EE server. Recently I wrote a tutorial on getting JBoss working on OpenSuse 10.2 for a client of mine. The tutorial is NOT complete because the packages built by JPackage are primarily intended for Redhat systems (even though they are suppose to be distribution agnostic.) I will update it, in a couple days, with the changes I applied to get it working but I thought someone might find the information useful enough in its present form.

Two for Tuesday

Got a couple links I will need to use for a client tomarrow:

X cygwin — Cygwin is a tool that provides some Unix functionality on windows. XCygwin adds an X server to the cygwin package, allowing for remote connections to Unix machines GUI enviroments.
FTP Install of Suse — Installing Suse via FTP is very useful but takes a little configuration know-how. I threw together a quick how-to on setting up an FTP install server for Suse, complete with firewall configuration. It also includes some information on using the install server as a general purpose FTP server as well.