Technology

There are 44 posts filed in Technology (this is page 4 of 5).

Automating Atlassian JIRA, Confluence, and Crowd Installation with Chef

As a user, I’ve always been impressed with Atlassian‘s products for software development, issue tracking and documentation. For companies who take these things seriously, JIRA, Greenhopper and Confluence are quickly becoming the go-to products, and with good reason: the products are easy to get started with but have the enterprise features that allow a company to customize workflows as their business changes. I hate to slam open-source products but just try doing what JIRA does with Bugzilla or Trac.

The products themselves, though, can be a nightmare to install, despite the fact that they are mostly just Java web applications living in a WAR file. The products have improved immensely from the days when setting them up involved hacking up a multitude of XML files in WEB-INF (though there still is some of that), and it’s still annoying that Atlassian doesn’t support running the applications as unexploded WARs within Tomcat or another servlet container, probably for the aforementioned reasons. All that aside, though, it’s satisfying when everything is working together and users can single-sign-onto the entire Atlassian suite because of the magic of Crowd, Atlassian’s SSO directory server.

Last week, I released a set of Chef cookbooks I wrote at SecondMarket to ease the installation of the Atlassian tools on a server. I’m still looking to automate more parts of this, including the ability to edit the aforementioned XML files in-place in an idempotent way, so pull requests against our GitHub repo would be welcome.

Special Note on Using Atlassian Products in the Amazon Cloud

I should also mention that my first attempt to set up Atlassian’s products using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) as a backing store was a failure. To spare you the pain of finding this out yourself, I’ll just mention the reason: Crowd, JIRA and Confluence expect MySQL to be configured with READ-COMMITTED transaction isolation level, which means you need to configure MySQL to have row-based binary-logging. Unfortunately, binlog_format is not a parameter you can configure in RDS’s DB Parameter Groups, for obvious reasons; it would affect all other clients on that MySQL instance. This has been confirmed with Amazon support, so JIRA/Crowd/Confluence with RDS is a no-go.

ground rules for success in a dynamic, new media environment

In the previous entry, I made the statement that many of us working in new media don’t have a clue about what’s going to be successful and what’s not. I wanted to expand on this topic with a few key points. At first glance, you could interpret these as being pet peeves. My intention, however, is to set some basic ground rules for success even in a space where tools, technologies and strategies change at the drop of a hat. Continue reading →

Red Hat upgrade complete!

Those of you who have been following my journal closely know that I’ve been working on a project at work to migrate our main web and Java cluster from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Well, we did the cut-over tonight and I’m pleased to note that everything pretty much went according to plan. Netcraft will now tell you that CBC.ca is running Apache 2.2.8 on Red Hat. Continue reading →

VAX/VMS on Linux using SIMH

Some of you are aware that I’m into vintage computers. Sadly, my basement cannot hold all the computers I wish I could actually have – and some of them are forever going to be too big to fit in any man’s house (not to mention “make it past a man’s significant other“).

But why would one actually need a VAX when, these days, one can emulate one on a Linux PC using SIMH? Not only can one emulate a VAX (take your pick: MicroVAX or VAX 11/780) but also a PDP-11, Data General Nova, some ancient Honeywell mainframes I’ve never heard of, or a bunch of other old mainframes or minicomputers.

I have a special nostalgia for the VAX, since I accessed my first real e-mail account at the National Capital Free-Net via a VAX in my dad’s office. On the anniversary of my Dad’s retirement, I’ve decided I’m going to try to get a VAX running in emulation under SIMH – running OpenVMS, no less. Do I know anything about running OpenVMS? Nope, I do not – but I’m going to find out. Yes, I know it’s a nearly obsolete operating system, and DCL is not the most intuitive. But hopefully it should prove to be a little bit amusing at least – wish me luck!

(On a completely unrelated note: People are still writing in to comment on the blog post where I got yelled at by Drew of Toothpaste For Dinner for offering an RSS feed. Haha! I’ve moved onto reading xkcd these days … that fellow seems far less uptight, and his comics are more reliably funny. And yes, xkcd has an RSS feed, if you had to ask.)

recovery procedure for VoIP PBX

My VoIP PBX (built on an embedded Linksys NSLU2) blew up tonight with a bad hard disk. Here’s the cheat sheet on how to recover it should it do the same next time.

  • Replace the hard disk and reboot the NSLU2. Since the network settings are stored in flash, it will come up on the old IP even if the hard disk has failed.
  • Format the new hard disk and partition it using fdisk. Swap space is recommended. Format it using mkfs.ext3.
  • Run turnup disk -i /dev/sda1 -t ext3 to move the rootfs to the disk.
  • Reboot NSLU2 and install Optware as follows:

    cd /tmp
    wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/slugosbe/cross/unstable/ipkg-opt_0.99.163-9_armeb.ipk
    tar -zxvf /tmp/ipkg-opt_0.99.163-9_armeb.ipk
    rm /tmp/debian-binary
    rm /tmp/control.tar.gz
    tar -ztvf /tmp/data.tar.gz
    cd /
    tar -zxvf /tmp/data.tar.gz
    rm /tmp/data.tar.gz
    cd /opt/etc
    sed -i “s//stable//unstable/” ipkg.conf
    /opt/bin/ipkg update

  • Restore old packages – namely, xinetd, net-snmp, asterisk14, tftp-hpa, esmtp, and all the things that asterisk recommends you install
  • Reconfigure /opt/etc/xinetd.conf to allow connections from the local LAN.

  • Restore data from backup – namely, the contents of /opt/tftpboot and /opt/etc/asterisk
  • Create a startup script for Asterisk because it’s missing in the default package:

    #!/bin/sh

    if [ -z “$1” ] ; then
    case `echo “$0″ | /bin/sed ‘s:^.*/(.*):1:g’` in
    S??*) rc=”start” ;;
    K??*) rc=”stop” ;;
    *) rc=”usage” ;;
    esac
    else
    rc=”$1″
    fi

    ASTERISK_DAEMON=/opt/sbin/asterisk

    case “$rc” in
    start)

    echo -n “Starting asterisk: ”
    $ASTERISK_DAEMON 2>/dev/null &
    echo ok
    ;;
    stop)
    if [ -n “`pidof asterisk`” ] ; then
    echo -n “Stopping asterisk: ”
    $ASTERISK_DAEMON -qrx ‘stop now’
    sleep 1
    echo ok
    fi
    ;;
    restart)
    “$0” stop
    sleep 1
    “$0” start
    ;;
    *)
    echo “Usage: $0 (start|stop|restart|usage)”
    ;;
    esac

Nokia N800 Internet Tablet and WPA2-PSK

A few weeks ago, my friend Brian lent me his Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, because he has gone and purchased an Apple iPhone and no longer needs it. I was hoping to try and use it as a SIP client on my VoIP network, so that I could wander about the house and still make calls. (Unfortunately, the N800 isn’t actually a phone, which makes it somewhat limited in functionality.) For the life of me, though, I can’t get the damn thing to talk WPA2! Continue reading →

on hacking the Unisys ICON

Some time ago I had promised to reminisce a little bit about the Unisys ICON terminals that I used through elementary school and high school, and some of the fun things we did with them (not all of them sanctioned by the school, of course). After reading in ;login: magazine about Dru Lavigne’s efforts [USENIX members only] to catalogue old protocols, I’ve been inspired to add a few words about the trusty old ICON.

Continue reading →

visiting the Canadian Clock Museum

Today I’m going to digress a bit from modern IT topics and talk about an aspect of turn-of-the-century IT that many of us have forgotten about: the venerable analog clock. It was less than 100 years ago that a wall-mounted, spring-driven, windup analog clock was still considered a major appliance. Salesmen used to go door-to-door and sell clocks; sometimes they would loan one to a household for a month to see how they liked it, and many times a household would find that they couldn’t do without it and would purchase it.

How do I know all of this? Because I recently visited the Canadian Clock Museum in my home town of Deep River, Ontario. Both Meredith & I expected to be underwhelmed, as many small-town museums are poorly-lit, haphazardly organized, and with little regard to proper museum cataloguing and preservation techniques. However, we were duly impressed with the clock museum, which has over 1000 artifacts, bootstrapped by more than 600 clocks from owner Allan Symons’ personal collection. The story goes that Allan retired from the local AECL research facility after 27 years, and once he hit 600 clocks his wife made him move the collection out of the basement, and so the museum was born.

The $5.00 admission fee includes a tour by Allan himself, which is well worth the money. Allan’s visibly passionate about the clocks that he has collected, preserved and/or restored, and it shows — he stayed over an hour past closing time to answer our questions and lead us through the museum. He has an intimate knowledge of clock machinery and clock history in Canada — he has an extensive collection of clocks from the now-defunct Western Clock (a/k/a Westclox) company based out of Peterborough, among other artifacts.

The museum also has a handful of other interesting artifacts, such as a collection of windup gramophones. Among them is an original Edison wax-cylinder gramophone with a number of four-minute (!!!) records. For a device that’s over 100 years old, the sound quality is actually surprisingly good.

If you’re ever in the Deep River area or even just driving through Deep River along Highway 17, I highly recommend dropping into the clock museum for a tour to learn about this fascinating piece of our history.