chtekk b10g - SysCP

FOSDEM 07, here we come!

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 22:12:25 +0100

Yo all!
Tomorrow to FOSDEM 07 /me goes, along with hansmi, KillerFox and blubb from the swiss crowd!
Later on both flo and EleRas will join us too, so for me not only will it be "the great Gentoo dev gathering", but also "the great SysCP dev gathering", will all three of us present. As flo correctly guessed, I'll be sporting the black Gentoo t-shirt, which is amazingly comfortable, but flo's SysCP t-shirt intrigued me... Is it possible to have more of those @ flo? In black? /me loves black! We'll be able to discuss that at FOSDEM I think...
Now off to bed, as I have to get up early (~4AM) to catch the first train to get to Basel, where the others await, and from there off to Bruxelles.
Lugano-Basel-Frankfurt Am Main-Köln-Bruxelles is the exact route, almost 1000 Km, for a total en-route time of about 11 hours, yay!
On the PHP front, I've finally put PHP 5.2.1 and PHP 4.4.5, with all the needed patches and, of course, Suhosin support, into the PHP Overlay. I'll test it all during the next days and hopefully commit to the tree on Monday at the latest. Many bugs are fixed with the latest releases, concurrentmodphp support was greatly improved and fixed (especially wrt 64bit archs), and the new MySQL extension patches are included to have the connection charset settable per-SAPI, for each PHP version, using php.ini, instead of my.cnf.
Work on VCD is also going steady, we should be near feature-completion soon, so expect some form of pre-release in the next two weeks... Poke Hollow on #gentoo-vserver for more info.
Best regards, cya all, CHTEKK.

Happy 2007!

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 01:16:35 +0100

Happy new year people!!!

I wish you all a great 2007 full of fun and happiness and all the other good stuff (new hardware comes to mind ).
23C3 finished two days ago, it was really great fun with great talks and great people (yeah, Polish guy living in the USA, from the university near Atlanta, you know who you are ).
Now we've passed yesterday by visiting Berlin and at the moment we're connected through the Hostels connection... It depresses me to know it's at least twice as fast as my home DSL.
By the way, all this convinced me to come to FOSDEM 07, so be prepared to know the CHTEKK (or be scared, that all depends).
Cya, and happy new year, CHTEKK.

Greetings from 23C3.

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:42:23 +0100

Yo! Greetings from the 23C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin.
Great talks and great people here, at the moment I'm attending a talk about JSON RPC (who knows, maybe that can/will be used someday to improve SysCP ), and before that I attended a really great talk about backbone hacking.
As you can see from this blog post, the wireless network works well (as does the wired one).
With regards to Gentoo devs, I've already seen and got to know hansmi, KillerFox and Pylon. I've also been told that mabi is around and hanno should be too (at least based on the fact he gave a Lightning Talk about XGL yesterday, which I sadly missed), we should really define a place to meet and get to know eachother... That goes for Gentoo and SysCP users too.
I myself can usually be found attending some talk or down in the Hackcenter (central position, at a round table).
Have fun!
Best regards, CHTEKK.

Work continues ...

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 02:34:22 +0100

Work on SysCP 1.3 continues, even with Christmas approaching!
General cleanup in various parts was done, me and EleRas reviewed all the regular expressions of the RegExp validator now used to validate data coming from the user, now they're much better and precise, and I've also added a Type validator to check that the type of the passed data is what we expect. Paging was also removed from the 1.3 codebase, as it was incomplete, outdated and completely broken there... It will be reimplemented once we've completed other parts of SysCP 1.3 which have priority.
And the biggest change probably, is that the whole login/logout system was updated and rewritten to conform to the new structure, the "new way of doing thins". It's still not 100% complete, but you can login and logout, so the main functionality is there. We've also switched to using Whirlpool as hashing algorithm for the SysCP account passwords, but we've already decided to later make this configurable by the admin; thanks to the hash extension present in PHP >=5.1.2 it's really easy to do that, and that extension is really great, thanks PHP devs for that!
Best regards, CHTEKK.

New Propel db structure on its way!

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 21:56:41 +0100

The new database structure for SysCP 1.4 is taking form, I'd say it's almost complete, only the foreign-key definitions are still missing, something I intend to rectify in a day or two.
While changing towards this new structure, we've also changed to use Propel to connect and work with the database, it will thus replace the old DatabaseHandler.
Starting with SysCP 1.4, thanks to all this, we'll also support using SysCP on a PostgreSQL database, and there will also be a module to let your customers create and administrate PostgreSQL databases, just like you can now with MySQL.
Only thing that deluded me a little is that the Propel generated classes change when built with MySQL or PgSQL, which is kinda "WTF?", as we're speaking about a database abstraction layer to an extent... Oh well, the changes are tiny and we'll then decide how to approach this... Either distributing two SysCP tarballs, one with PgSQL classes and one with the MySQL ones, or just supplying a diff against the MySQL ones to support PgSQL... Once we're more into the whole thing we'll be able to decide!
Best regards, CHTEKK.

/me away until 03.11

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 17:59:43 +0200

I'll be away from this evening UTC until evening UTC 03.11.2006, so don't search for me or await any reply from me.
Absolutely no internet access, so... See ya all in a week!
Best regards, CHTEKK.

Completion of languagesplitting

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:57:19 +0200

Right, no more "update"! I've done the last four modules today and EleRas did all the rest yesterday, many thanks for that.
Now we only need to update the old design and we'll then merge branches/syscp-1.3/ back into trunk/syscp-1.3/. YAY!
Step 1 of our plan to conquer the webpanel world completed.
EleRas also wrote a fancy script that does some comparisions and generates updated language files also for all the other languages SysCP supports, but those are highly incomplete now that many definitions etc. changed, so they will have to be updated by the translators.
English (of course), italian and german we can take care of ourselves, but for all the others we'd very much appreciate help from the community, we already have a list of translators, but having other people also working on it or as backup would really be great!
So if you know any of: Portugues, Chinese, Catalan, Russian, French, Spanish, Danish very well, drop a note to flo [at] syscp [dot] org and/or eleras [at] syscp [dot] org, thanks!
Best regards, CHTEKK.

Even more 1.3 ideas ;)

nospam@example.com (Luca Longinotti) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:08:59 +0200

Expanding on EleRas's latests posts...
Wrt the email question: I agree that having an additional level, where a user which is intended to only have an email-account, can login and at least modify his own password, is a very good idea. This can then naturally be extended for antispam/antivirus settings, auto-responders, filters, etc.. But, thinking about it, we suffer from the same problem with FTP: how can an additional FTP account user change his own password? Another "ftp" level? No, that's not the solution, as isn't only a new "email" level in my opinion...
Continue reading "Even more 1.3 ideas ;)"

New SysCP blog & status

nospam@example.com (admin) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 21:01:47 +0200

Hi all!
This blog post should be my first to also be syndicated on blog.syscp.org, one of the new resources we SysCP devs will use to better bring news and informations to you, the user.
First, let me again thank Martin Burchert aka eremit for all the work he's done over the years and the big help and guidance he has provided to all of us, and the really fantastic work done on SysCP 1.3! Thanks Martin!
Second, as EleRas said on his previous post, we're working on SysCP 1.3, largely following the proposals of SysCP EP01. We've already implemented most of the backend changes:

Modules versioning [CHTEKK]

Modules dependencies (with &&, || and < =>version support, and reverse-deps) [CHTEKK]

Modules on/off (and core modules which can't be turned off) [CHTEKK]

Plugins (modules can plugin frontend parts into eachother basically, extending themselves) [CHTEKK]

Validation Handler (class to validate and check user input) [EleRas]

XML-RPC Handler (class to work with a remote XML-RPC server) [CHTEKK]

Also on the frontend side we're going pretty well:

Modulesmanager done [EleRas]

Languageeditor done [EleRas]

Option to change the theme added [CHTEKK]

Also a lot of bugfixes were added, as well as the theme by me and Luca Piona (which is also default in 1.2.14 now, yay!), thanks to EleRas for porting that to the SysCP 1.3 structure!
We also should now be E_ALL and E_STRICT compliant on PHP 5.1.6 at least (that's what me and EleRas tested with, no more warnings, yay!).
The PHPBeautifier SysCP filter also was ran over the whole codebase, and yelded very good results and a much more readable and beautiful code (it's all about beauty today, isn't it? ).
And as EleRas also already announced, we're currently working on splitting up all the language files into a modular structure, it's no difficult job, but a tedious, boring one!
Plans for the future (future = SysCP 1.4 final release):

complete the language files split

integrate some new features (for example prodigy7's very good patches)

convert SysCP to use Propel for database access, and use a totally new, much more modular and normalized database layout

rewrite most of the modules to be compliant with the new database layout, while adding some features here and there, and making extensive use of the new features, like ValidationHandler, ...

add a module to administrate Vservers (Linux-Vserver based), that's part of a project I have to complete for school, so that will probably have priority for me during the next weeks

There's also some talk about adding some type of optional LDAP support sometimes in the future, we'll see about that...
Ah, and MacOS X support is also planned, again sometimes in the future, this will probably mainly be done by flo, unless someone buys me a Mac Mini (Intel CPU, at least 1GB ram, contact me for a shipping address ).
That's it. Arrr, I wrote a little bit more than I intended to, but at least this should be a fairly complete status update and explain what we're going to do next, so... Let's do it!
Best regards, CHTEKK.