Posts

  • Sep 10, 2009

    Moving Confluence to Solaris under VMWare

    As a proof of concept, yesterday I moved our Confluence installation to Solaris under VMWare from it's current home on a Linux box. I won't go into the background as to why I was doing this (most people would be shocked hearing I would move anything from Linux!) but the reason it was a proof of concept was the fact that Confluence isn't officially supported under VMWare.

    A few points:

    • There are lots of Solaris things I don't like after coming from Linux. Packaging first, and the tools it ships with (I want GNU grep and tar, dammit!)
    • To allow an unprivileged user (our confluence user in this case) to bind to privileged ports (i.e. TCP < 1024), run this as root with the user logged out usermod -K defaultpriv=basic,net_privaddr confluence
    • Use prstat, not top on Solaris
    • When Atlassian says don't use Solaris' version of tar, they mean it. I spent about half an hour debugging only to find that Solaris had untarred the file incorrectly. Grrr.
    • I love open formats and the *nix way. I did a mysqldump from our old server and found that our DB tables were using the MyISAM engine (not recommended by Atlassian), so I switched to InnoDB by a simple, quick sed through the dump. Brilliant. I love it.
    • To stress test the application after the move I used siege, which worked a treat. It's probably packaged for your Linux distro too

    Confluence seems to be running fine on the new VM and withstood my siege, it's only small (50 MB) so that might be a factor but it's worth testing if you need to make this move yourself.

  • Sep 7, 2009

    OpenAustralia DevLive 0.0.4 - Seek and ye shall find

    The new version of OpenAustralia DevLive is now available. Version 0.0.4 adds search functionality so you can test and hack on search related features and bugs.

    After the appliance boots, build the search index by opening a terminal and running:

    /srv/www/openaustralia/twfy/search/index.pl openaustralia daterange 2007-09-19 2007-09-21

    The 416 MB VMWare image can be downloaded from SUSE Studio for the next week or so. If you have any issues downloading or using the appliance, please leave a comment.

  • Sep 4, 2009

    Google Account OpenID URL

    It was harder than it should have been to find the URL to use for the OpenID provided by your Google Account, so for future reference, enter this in the address box of OpenID enabled sites:

    https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

  • Aug 25, 2009

    Google Search Appliance SMB URLs

    I’m running a proof of concept at work of the Google Search Appliance (GSA). Work’s very much a Microsoft Windows shop and for the demo I wanted the SMB search results to link to the files on the SMB share, not the GSA proxy that is the default.

    You can hack this with this small change to the XLST, a git-diff as follows:

    diff --git a/gsa-original b/gsa-smb
index ba1c66f..73751ab 100644
--- a/gsa-original
+++ b/gsa-smb
@@ -2680,8 +2680,7 @@ for (var j = 1; j < p.length; j++) { url += "&amp;" + p[j]; }}
         </xsl:when>
        <!-- *** URI for smb or NFS must be escaped because it appears in the URI query *** -->
         <xsl:when test="$protocol='nfs' or $protocol='smb'">
-         <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping='yes'
-                       select="concat($protocol,'/',$temp_url)"/>
+         <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping='yes' select="concat('file://', substring-after(U, '://'))"/>
         </xsl:when>
         <xsl:when test="$protocol='unc'">
           <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping='yes' select="concat('file://', $display_url2)"/>

    Now, after you collect your jaw from the floor when you realise that this will create URLs like file://servername/path/to/file, please remind yourself of the earlier caveats of hack and Windows. This actually took longer that it should have to debug as Firefox on Linux isn’t insane enough to make this work.

    If the POC works out and we decided to go ahead with the GSA use, I’d be searching for something a bit more robust (and if I’m working on it, I’ll share the details of what we decide to do!).

  • Aug 11, 2009

    My Favourite mySociety Proposals So Far

    mySociety, the people that originally built TheyWorkForYou, which OpenAustralia was built from, are running a call for proposals for ideas for new projects or features for mySociety to work on. These are my favourite ideas so far, in no particular order:

    The People's Think Tank - I find this idea interesting considering this week's stoush between the government and opposition on their different climate crisis policy proposals. The treatment from both parties of each other's policies has been pretty brutal and it struck me as very non-constructive. With this idea, you could potentially mash up the proposals and crowd-source the development of the policy.

    Me MP - I like this idea for the same reason as a lot of local government 2.0 ideas - that you generally want to do the same basic things and reinventing the wheel is wasteful. This idea applies that principle to running for office and has the potential to disrupt the two-party system.

    Where Does It Go - I don't have a comprehensive idea of where public money goes, do you? I see this proposal as applying to the budget, what OpenAustralia applies to the Hansard.

    AreTheyOnTime - Crowd-sourcing public transport running times, there's not much to say on this one - Sydney-siders would love it! If it was able to kick off, this could be really interesting in a real-time information kind of way - i.e. you could find out pretty accurately how late the service you were waiting for was going to be (could also be applied to buses). That is until we finally get GPS tracking, a al Auckland.

    Hear Hear - This sounds like a quick, simple system for the government to get feedback on ideas. It could become a focal point for the 'good' and 'bad' ideas of the moment.

    Now, what say you?

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