Fresh from the plantation

Inaugural New Zealand PloneGov Meeting

Tim Knapp — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:15:22 +1200

On Tuesday, July 1st, 5:30pm at 3months' offices in Wellington, New Zealand we had a meeting with many representatives from New Zealand Government to introduce the PloneGov project to them. Joel Burton also made a guest appearance (thanks Joel :)) and did an excellent job of introducing Plone 3's features from both the perspective of a user and/or developer. Until then I'd only heard about Joel's excellent teaching skills but now I can personally say he's a very engaging and interesting speaker!
We had about 15 attend from the Ministry of Women's Affairs, Ministry of Justice, the Office of the Auditor General, the Treasury department, the State Services Commission, the National Library, the Electricity Commission and some from the commercial sector. We've had good feedback from many who attended and have already begun organising a followup event in the form of NZ's first Kiwi Bootcamp and Sprint for around February 2009! Anyone is welcome!
Video's of both mine and Joel's presentations are available from plone.tv.

Inaugural NZPUG Christchurch Meetup

tim — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:25:12 +1200

We had 13 come along (including myself) from varied backgrounds: a human interface technology student, some web developers, an embedded hardware developer, an electrical engineer and various other python developers (I'm sure I've missed someone out here).

I started off proceedings with my Introduction to Repoze presentation. Following this Marek Kuziel presented his Password and Registration-free Authentication for Django presentation. The videos and slides are now available online.

Congratulations to Charles Han for winning the door prize. Can't wait till June's NZPUG meetup!

Plone and Python Promotion

tim — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:00:56 +1300

We've been back from Taiwan about 4 months now, and the trip was well worth it. I met some fellow FOSSers, bought a geek toy, and did some Plone promoting. On that note, I finally got around to posting a video of the presentation I gave at the TOSSUG meetup on plone.tv.
Interestingly, Taiwan has had a Python User Group (PUG) around for quite some time and this has been the rallying point for Python developers in Taiwan. They don't currently have enough Zope/Plone developers to start a user group specifically targeted at this developer segment but one idea we discussed was to promote Zope/Plone by way of the PUG.
Here in New Zealand, as far as I'm aware, the first official Python-related user group to start up was NZZUG. In recent times, Danny Adair has started up the New Zealand Python User Group (NZPUG) and they have already had their first meetup. This is great to see and I hope to be able to give a presentation at one of their upcoming meetups.

Chip In To Help Me Translate Plone into Samoan

Tim Knapp — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:33:01 +1300

Initially, a bit of background - about 2.5 years ago, myself and another Plone consultancy took the initiative to begin translating Plone into Maori, Samoan, and some other Pacific Island languages. Unfortunately we were denied funding for translating Plone into Maori (apparently Microsoft New Zealand had already created a bilingual CMS for the Maori Language Commission on the then pre-release MS CMS 2002) and as none of us were native Maori or Pacific Island language speakers and therefore not able to translate Plone ourselves the project stalled.
Recently, though, I've made a decision to start translating Plone 3.x into Samoan myself. It's a little slow going as I am not a native Samoan speaker (though I have Samoan heritage :)), but I am making good use of a Samoan dictionary and some online resources. I thought particularly with the end of year approaching and the inevitable slow down in work that happens over the holiday period I would ask the community if they would pledge any money towards my translation efforts over the holiday period (and therefore also contribute to my continuing to eat over the holiday break :)), so we can have another 'shiny translation' in Plone!
If you'd like to pledge any funds towards my translation efforts, click on this chipin for a Samoan Plone link. Thanks!

How I Restored My QEMU Windows XP Environment

tim — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:57:05 +1300

Recently I had to setup Enfold Server on Windows XP and as I run Kubuntu on my notebook, the virtual environment I've chosen to run Windows under is QEMU. I've been running QEMU for some time now and it provides all the features I need in a virtual machine, especially with kqemu installed. When I was in the process of setting up Enfold Server, though, I accidentally loaded the same QEMU image twice and the 2nd instance started running a CHKDSK on the drive and writing to it. After closing the 2nd instance down and restarting the already running Windows XP QEMU instance, Windows XP would get as far as the loading Windows XP screen and then cyclicly boot. I then attempted to mount the QEMU image (as it was in the RAW format) but when I did, I got the following error message: "primary boot sector is invalid". This was when alarm bells really started to ring as I'd put quite a lot of time and effort into this Windows XP QEMU image (including setting up all the Internet Explorer browsers and Safari for Windows), and unfortunately due to a file size error I was getting when attempting to backup the QEMU image, I didn't have a backup! After fruitlessly googling around for a resolution, I decided I'd attempt to boot off the Windows XP cdrom and attempt to recover the image that way. The following are the steps I took to restore my QEMU Windows XP Environment:

Booted off the Windows XP cdrom by typing the following at the command prompt:
qemu winxp.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d
When the "Welcome to Setup" screen appeared, pressed R to start the Recovery Console.
Executed the FIXMBR command from the Recovery Console.
Ran a CHKDSK to fixup any other problems that may have existed.

Technorati Blog Claim

tim — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:39:52 +1300

Technorati Profile

I Beat Paul Everitt To The Punch

tim — Thu, 17 May 2007 04:10:42 +1200

I had the honour of giving the first Plone speech at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan recently. TsungWei Hu, who arranged for me to give the speech, manages the Open Source Software Foundry (OSSF) project, whose key objectives are to promote Open Source Software in Taiwan. TsungWei mentioned that he had been meaning to ask Paul Everitt to give a speech regarding Plone at the Academia Sinica (Paul - hint, hint) but hadn't, so I got in first ;-)

This speech was the last in a series of Plone presentations I have been giving. The first of which was in Tokyo, Japan, and the next was for the Taipei Open Source Software User Group (TOSSUG). At the TOSSUG meetup I was able to meet Sean Moss-Pultz and Harald Welte of the OpenMoko project. Sean is the General/Technical Manager for the OpenMoko project, while Harald is the Lead System Level Architect. As I'm an Open Source fan and enjoy hacking my own computer, I'm really excited about what Sean, Harald and the rest of the OpenMoko Core Team are doing as mobile phones in general are pretty much closed devices nowadays.

Japan-style and NZ-style Plone Meetups

tim — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 03:49:02 +1200

On Wednesday, April the 18th, the Japan Zope Users Group had their quarterly meetup, and I gave a presentation regarding the use of Open Source software in New Zealand and particularly the use of Plone in New Zealand Government. My presentation also included a demonstration of creating a UML model for a simple Plone content type and associated workflow and then using the code generator, ArchGenXML, to create the product. I also demonstrated some of the benefits of using Instance Manager while doing Plone development. Following my presentation, Jonathan Lewis gave a report regarding what was achieved at the recent Sorrento sprint.

About 30+ people attended and it was really encouraging to see the enthusiasm for Plone in Japan, where Plone appears to be experiencing a similar surge in popularity as New Zealand and other countries around the world. Many thanks to Shigeo Honda who organised the event, WiseKnot who provided the venue (and beverages), those who helped me prepare the presentation, and all those that turned up to listen to the presentation.

Prior to our leaving for Japan, on February the 16th, we had a Plone Meetup 'New Zealand-style' where 6 of us met at a Malaysian restaurant and discussed the progress of Plone in New Zealand, some Python and Zope technologies, some Flash front-end goodness, and some friendly Microsoft Vs Google banter. I've received some nice feedback regarding the meetup so thanks for that and thanks to those who were able to attend and also those who were there in 'spirit' :-)

Finally, yesterday I met with Atsushi Shibata in Akihabara. Some of you may know that Shibata-san is responsible for the Plone Blogging product, CoreBlog2. Shibata-san has been pioneering the use of Plone/Zope in Japan for some time now and it was nice to discuss with him the progress of Plone in Japan and some of the challenges Japan faces going forward. I'm sure we both came away from the meeting enlightened and it is always nice to meet another Plonista!

Setting Up Development Environments for Plone

tim — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:21:28 +1300

N.B. The examples assume you are using a Linux-based operating system.

Do a subversion checkout of the instancemanager product into an appropriate location, by entering the following:
```
svn co http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/instancemanager/trunk/ instancemanager
```
Install instancemanager by entering the following command from within the instancemanager folder (this will ensure instancemanager runs from the checked out directory and can be easily updated):
```
sudo python setup.py develop
```
The first time you run instancemanager (just type instancemanager and press Enter), it creates an .instancemanager directory in your home directory. There you'll find a userdefaults.py that you can customise to your local needs.
The most relevant configuration directives you may want to change are the following:
```
zope_instance_template (where your zope instances will reside)
zope_location_template (the location where your zope server software resides - N.B. this can use python string substitution, e.g. /opt/zope/zope%(zope_version)s)
user (default admin username)
password (default admin password)
```

Following that, create a file called PROJECTNAME.py (can be empty) in the .instancemanager directory, customising that with project-specific settings (just copy the few items that you want to change from userdefaults.py.

archive_basedir_template (the directory where all your zope/plone compressed product files are stored)
symlink_basedir_template (the directory where you store your svn product checkouts)
archivebundle_basedir_template (the directory where you store your zope/plone compressed product bundles - usually the same as archive_basedir_template)
symlinkbundle_basedir_template (the directory where you store your svn bundle checkouts - usually the same as symlink_basedir_template)
python (the path to your zope instance's python binary)
zope_version (the version of the zope instance that hosts your Plone site)

Instancemanager expects to find the python/zope server software in a structured folder hierarchy (e.g. /opt/zope/zope2.9.6 and /opt/python/python2.4.4). I've found the easiest way to set this up is to use the Universal Installers listed on plone.org and modify the configuration directives in the install.sh bash script to point to those locations (for example, instead of pointing to /opt/Plone-2.5/ have them point to /opt/zope/zope2.9.6 and /opt/python/python2.4.4 respectively).
Copy the Data.fs with your Plone site's test data into the
zope_instance_template/datafs folder, ensuring it's renamed to PROJECTNAME.fs.
```
cp Data.fs ~/instances/datafs/PROJECTNAME.fs
```
Create the zope instance.
```
instancemanager fresh PROJECTNAME
```
All going well, you should now have a new zope instance created for your Plone site accessible via the standard methods, i.e. http://localhost:8080/manage

Some further documentation regarding instancemanager can be found here.
Some of the commands I often use are:

instancemanager fresh PROJECTNAME (creates a new zope instance, including setting up all the Plone products as specified in the project file and also creates a new Plone site)
instancemanager --products PROJECTNAME (just recreates the Products directory and all contained products)
instancemanager soft PROJECTNAME (stops and starts the zope instance and reinstalls the products specified in the main_products configuration directive in the project file)
instancemanager test PROJECTNAME (runs the tests for the main Plone product specified in the project file)
instancemanager --test MyPloneProduct PROJECTNAME (runs the tests for the specified Plone product, i.e. MyPloneProduct)

Achieving Server Xen

tim — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 02:19:57 +1300

Recently I had to setup Xen 3 for a client, and the following are the steps I undertook to install it (N.B. As a guide for the installation, I followed the instructions listed here).

The most pertinent hardware specifications for the server we installed Xen 3 on are as follows:

2x Intel Xeon 1.6 Ghz CPUs
4GB DDR2-667 RAM
3ware 9550SX-4LP PCI-X-to-SATA II RAID controller
4x Seagate Barracuda ES SATA 3.0GB/s 250GB hard drives (configured as RAID 5)

Firstly, I downloaded and burned the Debian testing (etch) netinst CD image to CD.
Following this, I began installing Debian etch on the server using the netinst CD.
At the disk partitioning screen, I setup the hard drive as follows:
Disk /dev/sda: 749.9 GB, 749966721024 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91178 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 365 2931831 83 Linux /dev/sda2 366 1581 9767520 8e Linux LVM /dev/sda3 1582 4013 19535040 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda4 4014 91178 700152862+ 8e Linux LVM
N.B. The /dev/sda4 LVM partition is where the logical volumes for the Xen guest domains (virtual servers) are to be stored.
I left the rest of the installation steps at their setup defaults.
I then installed Xen 3 on the server by entering the following command:
apt-get install xen-linux-system-2.6.18-3-xen-686 xen-tools \\ xen-docs-3.0 libc6-xen file xen-hypervisor-3.0.3-1-i386-pae \\ xen-linux-system-2.6.18-3-xen-vserver-686 bridge-utils
Following this, I made the following change in the /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp file and rebooted the server:
replace
(network-script network-dummy)
with
(network-script 'network-bridge netdev=eth0')
I now made the following changes to the /etc/xen-tools/xen-tools.conf file:lvm = vservers debootstrap = 1 size = 10Gb memory = 512Mb swap = 1Gb fs = reiserfs dist = etch image = sparse kernel = /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-xen-vserver-686 initrd = /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-3-xen-vserver-686 mirror = http://debian.orcon.net.nz/debian
Following this, I created a new guest domain (or virtual server) on the server by entering the following command:
xen-create-image --hostname myservername.mydomain.co.nz --dhcp
I then booted the guest domain by entering the following:
xm create /etc/xen/myservername.mydomain.co.nz.cfg
I now connected a virtual console to my newly created guest domain by entering the following and then logged on as root:
xm console myservername.mydomain.co.nz
Finally, I set the root password and then logged off the
virtual console by typing CTRL+] and then made a ssh connection to the guest domain and started setting up the services on it.

Back In The Plone Saddle

tim — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:30:47 +1300

After a brief interlude, I'm back developing in Plone again. I think, like myself, most Plone developers have found that Plone has increased in popularity and that they are finding themselves inundated with work. It's no wonder that this has happened, as Plone has progressed from being just a visual style for the Zope CMF (as when I started developing in Plone back in November 2003 when it was at version 1.0.5) to a fully fledged Enterprise CMS. Some of the more recent features introduced in Plone 2.5 being:

the Pluggable Authentication Service (PAS)
Placeful workflow support
GenericSetup support to allow site structure/settings to be defined in XML profiles

Some of the up-and-coming features in Plone 3.0 are:

a much improved administrative engine for portlets
AJAX-ifying the administrative interface
ensuring link integrity
prevent concurrent through-the-web editing via locking
support for indexing Word, PDF and other common types
in-place content staging

Just some further reasons why Plone is a very popular CMS platform.

My recent work for some of my clients has also given me an opportunity to catch up on some of the more recent Plone development tools. Following are some of the development tools I see as necessary for any Plone developer developing in Plone 2.5:

Clouseau - this tool works with Plone 2.1.x and Plone 2.5.x (though it won't display the properties on objects in Plone 2.1.x) and enables you to do live debugging of your Plone site via a web browser. I've lost count of the number of times I have recommended Clouseau to newbie Plone developers on #plone recently. And thanks a lot Andy for your efforts in developing this invaluable tool! (+ those who aided you in its development).
ArchGenXML - there is an excellent tutorial by Jens W. Klein on plone.org regarding this essential Plone development tool.
ArgoUML - an open source UML editor that can be loaded with a default model that contains many of the data types, stereotypes and tagged value definitions for ArchGenXML.
Eclipse - Mikko Ohtamaa wrote a tutorial on plone.org regarding using this IDE to develop in Plone.
Instance manager - a great tool by Zest Software that simplifies the process of creating Zope instances, product installation, restarting, and quick-reinstalling.
Firebug - if you skin Plone websites this is a "must-have".
Some other links that may prove useful.

Sysadmin Stresses

Tim Knapp — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 22:09:18 +1300

This may be my last post as a sysadmin as like some other people, I've discovered that being a sysadmin has its own challenges, most especially the need to be constantly available, as computer systems can fall over at any time. Something, though, that proved invaluable in my previous role was some Systems Monitoring software called Zenoss (another attraction was that it runs on Zope!).
After ensuring I had the prerequisite software, the installation wasn't difficult. It was a bit of a nuisance that Zenoss creates its own Zope instance but the specific python products it installed within the Zope instance really required this for ease of setup.
Once the Zenoss server software was installed, I then had to configure the network devices to notify Zenoss via SNMP of their current status. Though the organisation where I worked had a few varied operating systems and devices, this wasn't a problem. SNMP Informant (with the MBM module for CPU, case, and component monitoring), Syslog, and Zenwin provided monitoring for the Windows 2003 server (there were some gotchas with the setup of the SNMP service but a big thanks to #zenoss as they helped me resolve the particular issues I had). The snmp package took care of my Linux boxes and Zenoss' builtin Cisco support provided monitoring for the Cisco router.
Once I had added all the network devices, I then setup Zenoss to send notifications via email whenever specified Zenoss events occured.
When Zenoss is notified of an event it categorises the event by such things as type of event, severity, etc. When Zenoss is unsure of how to categorise an event, you can categorise it manually. Zenoss can use this criteria for its event notification system.
Something that really impressed me about the Zenoss project was that when I subscribed to the mailing list, I requested a Zenoss t-shirt and though I live at the bottom of the world in New Zealand they sent me one!

Setting Up Windows Active Directory LDAP Authentication In Plone 2.5

Tim Knapp — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:56:50 +1200

Emerge Technology had an enquiry from a client recently regarding setting up authentication via Active Directory in Plone 2.5. I share our response here for the benefit of anyone else who wishes to do this (the test environment I setup included Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, Zope 2.9, and Plone 2.5):

One recommendation I would have is that you install LDAPMultiPlugins1.2 (available from here http://www.dataflake.org/software/ldapmultiplugins/ldapmultiplugins_1.2) and remove LDAPUserFolderExt-0.41 (As per normal Zope Product installation procedures you will need to stop and start your Zope instance after installing the product).
Following this, do the following:
Go to acl_users and add a 'ActiveDirectory Multi Plugin'
Go to 'Contents' of the new plugin, go to 'acl_users' and configure your LDAP settings there. You can test if it works correctly by searching for users via the 'Users' tab
Setup your LDAP Schema mappings to Plone fields in the 'LDAP Schema' tab
Go back to the ActiveDirectory Multi Plugin and enable the functionalities you require in the 'Activate' tab.

An Alternative To Ubuntu

tim — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +1200

I recently installed Ubuntu on a desktop computer at work and do like it but as Ubuntu uses Gnome as its Window Manager and I'm a KDE fan (unsure whether this is due to my familiarity with the desktop environment or its extensive feature set), I was still seeking a version of Ubuntu that used KDE instead of Gnome. I was already familiar with Kubuntu but had heard from a few friends that it had bugs so I wasn't that keen to try it out. Then one of my company's suppliers told me about Mepis and that it uses the same repositories as Ubuntu and best of all it uses KDE!
I installed it on an Acer notebook and it installed with no problems. I thought this was quite impressive considering the recentness of the notebook. I am currently trying to get my Linksys WPC54G Version 3 going using ndiswrapper but haven't been successful yet.
My only complaints are that in my opinion it installs a little too much software by default. For example, it installs Kaquarium, Ksensors, and a whole lot of other utilities that I possibly won't ever use. I suppose, though, the maintainers of any Linux distribution have to balance ease of installation and the number of applications they will include by default (it was nice,though, to see Skype included in the default install). The base install was about 2 gigabytes, though, and Mepis installs this all to the root partition so ensure you make the root partition large enough.

A Router Configuration Itch

Tim Knapp — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:31:51 +1200

In New Zealand, due to our older telecommunications infrastructure, many people are using ADSL for their broadband internet connections, which uses the older copper-based telephone lines for transmission. This means slower speeds and in my case problematic internet configurations.
Specifically, I was trying to setup a web server that could be accessed over the internet. Our network configuration at work is as follows: we have an ADSL router with 2 network interfaces, a WAN interface (which we'll call r-eth0) and a LAN interface (which we'll call r-eth1). We also have a m0n0wall firewall with 2 interfaces, which we'll call fw-eth0 and fw-eth1. r-eth0 has a public internet address (assigned by the ISP), both r-eth1 and fw-eth0 are on the same subnet, and fw-eth1 is connected to our internal company network (a separate subnet). The web server is on the same subnet as fw-eth1 (our internal company network), and NAT is enabled on the ADSL router and is port-forwarding web traffic (TCP Port 80) through to the IP address of the web server.
The problem was that when people would try and open a website on the web server, it would just sit there and eventually timeout. The m0n0wall firewall logs indicated that the web traffic was successfully getting to the web server but traffic from the web server back out to the internet was being blocked. This was when I worked out that the cause of the problem was the firewall. A big thanks to Kent Brown Lee of Connect Logic here as he spent a lot of time helping me resolve this problem and eventually determined that as the m0n0wall firewall has inbuilt NAT, the outbound connections from the web server were being 'double-NATed'. To stop this occuring we turned on 'Advanced Outbound NAT' on the m0n0wall firewall and now people can access the website over the internet.