I installed a new site on one of my boxes using textpattern on Ubuntu 5.10. Because I routinely forget things, I figured I’d pastebomb my notes here so that I could find them again. Isn’t Google great….
Notes Follow
After a great deal of looking, I think I finally found a nearly perfect combination of software for web-based chat. In some ways it’s a bit of a throwback, but mostly, it’s really clean and user friendly.
On the back end, I installed the ejabberd XMPP/Jabber server. This beast is great. It required minimal work to get it installed on a Ubuntu or Debian box, had its owd distributed database, and was cluster ready if I need it later.In addition, it uses a web based admin interface which can make life easier when it comes time to do routine maintenance. On top of that, it takes very little in the way of server resources – which is very good.
On the front end, I’m using JWChat, a web based Jabber client. First, it’s a full Jabber client, with most of the bells and whistles. Second, it doesn’t use PHP, Java, or anything else on the server side. The only thing it needed was a bit of mod_proxy configuration to allow access to the http polling interface of ejabberd. After that, it uses AJAX and XML-HTTP request to do all the real work on the client side. While the server load is higher than you would get with a full-client setup, the administration is easier. In the end, it’s probably a wash. Its big advantage, though, is that it’s available from anybody’s borrowed PC with a web browser. It also works great in Internet cafe type setups.
I recently went throught a drought of blog posting. This happened primarily because my trailer was stolen, and I didn’t feel like doing much beyond the necessary. While it was recovered a few days later, cleaning up all the mess and paperwork was a bit much, and didn’t improve my mood or my time availability.
Fortunately, things are doing better at the moment – and I can (hopefully) get back here to blog more regularly.
About 3 years ago, I set up a router at my parent’s place. It was basically an old 80486 box with a pair ef ethernets in it, and it ran OpenBSD. Today, they got Vonage and I ended up SSH’ing into the box to find out why the Vonage box wasn’t hitting the rest of the world.
Silly me, when I configured the machine, I used static IP addresses on the inside of the firewall. The new machine was sending DHCP requests to the firewall, which was just ignoring them. The old setup worked fine until this thing needed an IP address and I wasn’t around to give it one. Oh well….
I ended up configuring a DHCP daemon on the machine, and setting up a few firewall rules to allow it access to the network. Once that was out of the way, the rest of the work went vers smoothly. It’s a good thing, however, that I installed SSH on that box – or I’d need 2000 mile arms 
The only hard part is that the DHCP daemon by default wants to listen on all ports. There’s a command line option to fix that, but to make that work with stock OpenBSD requires a bit of patience.
I’m finally getting ready to replace the mail system on the server set I’ve been managing. This time, I’m going with citadel instead of one of the PHP or .net based solutions. This is mainly because it’s a whole lot smaller and faster than the competing solutions, as well as being far easier to install. The basic installation took me less than an hour, and that included ssl support for IMAP and POP3.
Not only does the beast have POP, IMAP and webmail, but it also has calendar, notes, chat, and shared message support. I can’t believe that it’s as obscure as it is. Oh well… Here’s the link.
I’m doing a bit of python work with the Django application framework, and thought a picture might be in order…
Have a good day