Generic Reporting Intranet - Sample soon

In a matter of days a snapshot of the code base for my Report Portal tool should be available via Google Code. Still in development this web-based tool currently looks as below:

I'm currently putting together a short example configuration and supporting document. The tool attempts to act as a portal to gather report content from your many servers and present them via a per-user secure web front-end.

It is fully JavaScript driven and makes use of JSON and AJAX to deliver a desktop-like application experience.

Skulker v1.1.0 Nears Release

It has been a while since the previous release of Skulker and so a few queued requests and an annoying but have been dealt with. See the Skulker page for full details, but the most important being improvements for pattern matching, a new option to set permissions and a working history log.


It has been completed and shortly packages and updated documentation will be posted on the relevant code page. 

Only developing linuxha.net - nope!

Updating one project would be a little bit boring for me so I'm also undertaking the following in parallel:

Improvements to TP2 to help make packaging signing and repository management easier.

Re-writing a reporting intranet that was based on Perl to a "web v2" style Javascript application. No code online for this as yet ... but soon. I've not written any Javascript before and so going from nothing to writing a GUI application with thousands of lines of code, JSON, AJAX is proving to be slower going that I had hoped!

linuxha.net 1.4.11 in development

It has been about 8 months since the release of 1.4.10 and so I thought it time to look at linuxha.net and give it an update. The release will feature support for the functionality offered by the recent DRBD revisions, updates to core libraries, improved documentation, added testing functionality and the big change ... IP version 6.

Supporting the latest version of IP is a big change and requires a fair amount of re-work and several hurdles to over-come. The first was the lack of a "ping6" perl equivalent... hence a week spent hacking 'c' code to create a library which linuxha.net will dynamically load to provide optimal icmp ping functionality over IP v6.

I'm now currently writing and test changes to network handling in the libraries that linuxha.net provides. I've not got a release date as yet but am hoping before the end of the year.

True Packager 1.3.0 out - at last...

Adding Windows support (even basic support at that) took much longer than expected. However it is done and I can now turn my attention to the following over the next couple of months:

Linuxha.net - Support for RHEL6 and clones, latest versions of DRBD, minor improvements

TrueCL - Same as above + better bsd support, etc.

TruePackager development continues

Changes, fixes and enhancements continue in the TP2 world. The next release will have a lot of changes behind the scenes to implement Windows support. Yes - in the real world people use a variety of platforms, not just Linux/UNIX!

Although Windows support (or a move towards it) is certainly a big change, is is not the only one. Some rather fun ideas make it into 1.3.0. Some, but not all are:

• Install package directly from file - currently files can only be installed from repositories. Ok - not earth shattering - but big convenience change.
• Protected Repositories. The daemon can handle copying files into, removing files from and signing packages in repositories. Full ACL support can be provided too.
• Improved preview mode - the preview mode will include file system impact information like a full installation.
• Multi-signed packages. Packages can be signed by more than one person/entity.
• Flexible Namespace signing rules. Namespaces can indicate a minimum number of known signers, a subset of "must signers" etc.
• Permissions correct on package refresh. Installation of a package at the same level, even if the package does not change will refresh permissions to correct values if necessary. This level of change is captured in the log too.
• Namespace immutable files. Each namespace can indicate certain files as being immutable to change or delete. In this instances packages can be installed, but the contents of the those files will not be affected. Full information of handling of such files will be placed in the log.

TrueCL - 0.9.4 approaches

Another significant bunch of changes have been pushed up into the code repository. These changes represent a small but still significant set of improvements. There is only really one bug stopping a 0.9.4 release and I intend to tackle this tomorrow night. Then it is simply a matter of completing the documentation updates and a bit more testing!