Adlibitum

Finally after far too much development, and bouts of bitrot we've released our Adlibre TMS - timesheet and expense tracking system as open source software.

Adlibre TMS is an easy to use timesheet and expense tracking system with web service API interfaces to Saasu online accounting. With Adlibre TMS it is trivial to bill clients to time and expenses.

This tool has been designed with contractors and consultants in mind, yet it is flexible enough to bend to fit almost any business.

We wrote this application for our own needs and are now making it 100% freely available. The source ...

— Andrew

I've been looking for a Django powered general purpose e-commerce shop solution for a while.

It seems that there are still only three contenders in this space...

• Django Shop
• Satchmo
• Lightening Fast Shop

I haven't yet had a chance to fully evaluate all three of these in detail, but I hope to find the time over the next few days and I will update this post with a relevant comparison (or at least let you know which one I chose for my next project).

Update 2012-01-17:

So after looking at the above we determined:

• Django Shop - too immature ...

— Andrew

It is possible to resize a VMware .VMDK file without using the VMware tools.

The QEMU disk image utility comes with qemu-img a tool which allows you to convert virtual disk formats.

To resize a VMDK using qemu-img

# First convert the vmdk to raw format
# NB. Make sure you reference the actual disk image and not the .vmdk descriptor file
qemu-img convert linux-flat.vmdk linux.raw

# Extend the vmdk using dd. 
# Here we are extending the disk to 16G using dd. The resulting file will be sparse
dd if=./linux.raw of=./linux-16G.raw BS=1M seek=16384 oflag=append ...

— Andrew

Generic Enterprise Linux is now days too important. We believe it's used by too many people (and large organisations) for the release cycles, the future and the engagement of the community to be beholden to one project.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a real community driven Enterprise Linux (EL) project? One that was accountable to it's user-base, and could engage the Enterprise Linux community (and commercial users) in new ways?

What about an Enterprise Linux project that was able to reduce the duplication of effort in debranding our favourite upstream distro? Leading to benefits for ...

— Andrew

Here's another one of our famous 5 minute install guides. This one is for Centos 5.6 and WolfCMS (aka FrogCMS) version 0.75.

Once again this assumes a clean install of CentOS 5, with nothing else on the box. If your setup is slightly different you will need to make allowances.

Install our pre requisites

# Install the necessary software
yum install -y httpd mysql-server php53 php53-mysql wget
# Turn on the Services
chkconfig httpd on
chkconfig mysqld on
# Start the services
service httpd start
service mysqld start

Download WolfCMS and put the files in /var/www/html

cd /tmp ...

— Andrew

The recent high profile hack of Distribute.IT has been generating quite a lot of noise over the last few days amongst the Australian Internet industry. And we've received a few emails from our dedicated hosting customers wanting to know more about the details of the hack and how it could affect them.

The truth is, most of the details surrounding the "hack" are sketchy. But we do know:

• Four of Distribute.IT's shared hosting servers were involved,
• Comprising over 4,800 sites involved
• Offline, or otherwise logically separated backups were not available
• and all data, websites and ...

— Andrew

We are huge fans of OpenVZ container level virtualisation. Although we're quite puzzled as to why it is not more popular.

What is OpenVZ you ask?

OpenVZ is operating system-level virtualization based on a modified Linux kernel that allows a physical server to run multiple isolated instances known as containers, virtual private servers (VPS), or virtual environments (VE). The preferred term these days is container. Containers are sometimes compared to chroot or jail type environments but containers are really much better in terms of isolation, security, functionality, and resource management.

Why we use OpenVZ

In a nutshell: Because a ...

— Andrew

We're a big fan online file storage and replication services such as Dropbox, SpiderOak, or Ubuntu One. They enable mobile workers to collaborate, share files, work on the go and generally be more productive.

Due to security considerations (or data sovereignty laws) many of these services are not suitable for storing confidential or commercially sensitive material. Many of these services previously thought to be secure have now been shown to be insecure by design. (Hey Dropbox, almost a year ago, we noticed that you're using global dedupe across your customers files! When we added a common .iso file ...

— Andrew

Here is a quick run down of some major features and updates that we'll soon see in CentOS 6. (When it's finally released).

Filesystem & Storage:

• ext4 is now the default filesystem,
• LVM finally supports mergable snapshots - finally we can implement safe (transacted) file level replication using rsync.

Network:

• iSCSI support for root and /boot partitions

Kernel:

• Updated 'tickless' kernel - save power,
• Cgroups support for resource allocation amongst process group.

Web and applications:

• Apache 2.2
• MySQL 5.1.47
• PostgreSQL 8.4.4
• Memcached 1.4.4
• Ruby 1.8.7
• PHP 5.3.2
• Tomcat 6 / OpenJDK ...

— Andrew

If you're running FreeNAS 8 under VMware, Xen or KVM, then you'll probably want to disable ntpd. To do this you'll need to ssh into your FreeNAS box as root and run the following commands.

mount -uw /
vi /conf/base/etc/rc.conf

Change ntpd_enable="YES" to ntpd_enable="NO" and ntpd_sync_on_start="YES" to ntpd_sync_on_start="NO".

Then reboot and you should find that ntpd has been disabled. This should help eliminate any time jitter issues when running ntpd on a virtualised environment.

— Andrew