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Gord's blog
Step inside the mind of the man with two brains, each one smaller than the other...
Subversion 1.6
We have updated our source code repository software from 1.4.3 to 1.6 (on RHEL4). This is how we did it...
The current version of the Subversion software (svn) on our servers was 1.4.2 which at the time of writing is the version found in the RHEL 5 rpm repository (rhel-x86_64-server-5). We wanted to upgrade to the latest version.
Go to Upgrading Subversion to find out how.
Plone 4 installed
The latest all singing all dancing version of the Plone/Zope platform has been installed.
Bye bye windows, its been a sweet ...
Transform your old windows PCs into linux workstations; you know it makes sense. Go on, unleash those old PCs.
There must be several people out there like me who have loads of kids and nearly as many oldish PCs.
The older they get (the kids) the more needy they become for permanent integration to social networks such as FaceBook not to mention Itunes, Iplayer etc etc, the list goes on. Short of inventing a time machine to transport them to some Matrix-like, Orwellian future where they can exist in some brain-implanted limbo along with their countless hundreds of friends I decided to dedicate my old desktop PC to this task. How a thirteen year old can have over 300 friends is still way beyond my mortal comprehension. Still its better than the mammoth phone bills my eldest daughter used to accrue (pre FaceBook).
Unfortunately the opposite rule applies to computers, where thanks largely to ever increasingly resource hungry operating systems the older they are, the slower and hence child unfriendly they become.
Add to that my inability to find the original Windows installation CDs and my reluctance to pay for a new set. What to do?
I had thought about it for a while but had never taken the plunge. Well, recently I went for it. I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu 10.04 most often referred to as Lucid Lynx, burned the resulting ISO image on to a CD and stuck it in the CD tray...
That was Friday PM. By Sunday night my other half's laptop had made the transformation from a sluggish 4 year old windows slave to a more fleet of foot useful piece of kit.
What did I like? They way it had just worked. I was worried about a lack of drivers and the potential of being an outcast with a machine that would never see the light of a wireless network again. But my fears were unheeded, Ubuntu worked seamlessly with my Belkin Adaptor (which I had read may give cause for doubt). There were overall very few teething problems and the result is a 5 year old desktop and a 4 year old laptop with a colourful sexy windowed gui with wobbly windows (yes Gnome has move on), nice fonts and from my daughters perspective an instantly available list of friends that at the click of a button will be at her beck and call.
Tomorrow being the first day of October means that Ubuntu 10.10 is freely available. I wonder what goodies are in store...
Plone user migration
Plone eyes only... Where to find information on how to do this? There seems to be a fair bit of detail on how to migrate from one site to another at the same version, but not a lot on upgrading.
Tried an export/import of acl_users and portal_memberdata and although no errors arose, users cannot login properly although the passwords are accepted. Presumably scripting/external methods are required...
portal_migration tool
Caveat: A renamed copy of the original acl_users threw a spanner in the works for a while but after getting rid of that everything seems rosy in the beetle garden.
Plone 3.3.5
We did install 3.3.4 but we've been sooo busy that I didn't get round to posting this. Anyway that was then and now is now. Plone 3.3.5 is being rolled out across the cluster.
Plone 3.3.5 will probably be the last release of the Plone 3 series. Plone 4 is due out any day now.
Plone 3.3.4
Installed on test servers.
Initial indicators are looking good. The browser incompatibilities of version 3.3.1 seem to be cured so fingers crossed...
Portal Javascripts
Plone 3.3.1
This version has been withdrawn from the BB test environment.
Due to some browser incompatibilities that we discovered with this Plone version and other software that we offer as part of our solution portfolio we have decided to postpone installation of the latest version of Plone across our server infrastructure.
Bah humbug!
Beetlebrow web site is all shiny and glimmering
I applied some varnish to the web site and now it really does sparkle.
Varnish is an open-source software caching and load-balancing service thats becoming more popular in linux environments. Its low footprint on machine resources means that more memory and cpu is left to run the applications which is obviously good as we don't need to install two separate services to do two different things. Also it leaves lower-level functions like paging and/or swapping to the operating system which sounds eminently sensible as there will be less room for confusion between the two with far less (and hopefully no) redundant i/os taking place. For example rereading blocks of memory from disk which had been paged out by the operating systems just to flag them as paged-out by the caching service and to write them out again is an obvious inefficient waste of time (and cpu). This is what may happen elsewhere (allegedly)! Varnish has been applied to this web site and will undergo a period of testing before being brushed all over our other sites too. Meanwhile for those who are interested, on our older servers we use the core-pairing of two other leading open-source performance services. Squid for caching and Pound for load balancing between servers (both virtual and physical). Apache is used everywhere for serving web requests...
Plone 3.3.1 has been installed on the test environment
A brand spanking new version of the mother of all CMS's has just hot our test server hotbed.
We'll give it a good thrashing...
Blog discussion - comments and replies
More functionality added to the BB Blog product. Comments and replies are now displayed in the blog proper and not just in the individual blog entry.
BB Blogs were great but now they're even better. Some whizzy plonista coding has been extrapolated from the depths of a plone python egg and placed lovingly into the bb blog product at the right place. This now means that comments and replies will be displayed in the blog proper and you don't have to view an individual blog entry to see if there is any discussion on it.
Hopefully you'll see a shiny new button beneath me that says discuss.
This is a good thing.
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