After less than a week of vacation I've decided it was time to write a short blog entry, as I plan to write at least another one in some days, as we are waiting the arrival of Marc, our second son, for this week or the next one.

In the last months I haven't done what I said in my last posts, I'm quite busy with the rest of my life and blogging or keeping my home computing infrastructure is not on the top list.

Anyway I still have managed to do some things like giving a talk about virtualization on the VII Jornades de Programari Lliure, not going to Debconf8 (next year should be the one, the conference is in Spain and I have enough time to prepare it, including a possible trip with all the family) or do a partial server migration at home, leaving two machines to do the work of one.

My plan for the migration has changed and if time permits I'll try to do it in the next couple of weeks; now I plan to move my current servers to an ASUS EeePC with 2GB of RAM and an external USB disk (it is a lot smaller and the hardware is still faster than my old server) and I'll use OpenVZ instead of Linux-Vserver for virtualization (OpenVZ enabled kernels are available for Lenny).

I've been using Subversion and Trac for some years now, and I have encouraged its use at work since the last couple of years, with the undesired effect of having to maintain four different Trac installations with different database systems (SQLite3 and PostgreSQL), plugins (more than 15 on the big servers), authentication systems (htpass files, LDAP and a database based system) and tons of projects published (two internal servers have 64 and 16 projects, one of the client system has 33 projects and there is only one single project installation, but it is living at a client's system).

Yesterday night, while reading Planet Debian I found a post from John Goerzen about tools to replace Trac, including the option to use Git as the project VCS.

In the post he talks about different options, mainly projects that I would categorize as issue tracking systems (mantis, roundup, etc.), but it also talks about Redmine, a project management system implemented using the Ruby on Rails framework that is similar to Trac.

As it looked interesting I downloaded, installed and executed an instance in about 15 minutes (I love the systems that support sqlite3 for this quick tests, not having to touch real database servers speeds up simple tests a lot).

I played a little bit with the system and I believe that I will spend some more time testing it at work next week, as it looks quite promising; the standard version has almost all the features I'm interested in without the need to install additional plugins and it can do most of the things I was missing from Trac to do lightweight project management.

I evaluated ]project-open[ to use it together with Trac for our internal project management tasks, mainly because we miss important features from Trac, like having clean systems to view the tasks of a user in all projects or a clean way to do the project planning using tickets and gantt charts. Of course there are ways to do it, but the plugins I've tried are not as good and simple as I would like.

The problem with the use of ]project-open[ is that I don't really like it for us, as it has tons of features that I feel we don't need nor will use and, on a first try, the system seemed difficult to deploy and maintain, probably because my lack of knowledge about OpenACS and TCL.

In fact we still don't have ]po[ running at work because I was unable to to integrate the authentication system with our LDAP server on my first tries and have had no time to investigate further since then.

The good thing about trying Redmine is that if we don't end up using it at least I can take the most of this opportunity by looking at Ruby on Rails and the Ruby Programming Language, at least from the administration side, as I have never looked at it seriously.

The problem

On a couple of Debian Etch systems we have a plone-site that is published using a backport of the nginx web server.

The Zope instance is running on the standard port and serves the Plone contents under the /plone path.

Initially we were publishing the site to the external world using an https site served by nginx using the following entry on the configuration:

  location /plone/ {
    proxy_pass http://plone:9673;
    include    /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
  }

The proxy.conf contents are quite standard:

  # proxy.conf
  proxy_redirect                  off;
  proxy_set_header                Host $host;
  proxy_set_header                X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header                X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  client_max_body_size            0;
  client_body_buffer_size         128k;
  proxy_connect_timeout           90;
  proxy_send_timeout              90;
  proxy_read_timeout              90;
  proxy_buffer_size               4k;
  proxy_buffers                   4 32k;
  proxy_busy_buffers_size         64k;
  proxy_temp_file_write_size      64k;

With this settings we see the /plone contents using the same path that is used by the Zope instance, but after testing we have decided to change the /plone path and server the contents under the /web path.

The Wrong Solution

The fist option I though about was quite simple, rename the Zope's plone object to web.

Seems reasonable and simple for someone without Zope experience (I don't administer the internals of the Zope/Plone site), but now I know that it is a very big mistake, because renaming objects in Zope in not cheap, as it implies that the server has to modify all the contents of the renamed object and the operation can take a very long time.

With my ignorance I tried to rename the plone object using the Zope administrative interface and after a minute or so I cancelled the page loading that was running on my browser, thinking that I had cancelled the rename operation.

To make a long story short I'll tell you that the operation was still running and after several hours the folder was renamed (in fact I noticed when the good solution broke, as I had already solved the problem using the next method), but something went wrong and part of the site functionality was broken... the final solution to the debacle has been to recover a backup of the Zope instance older than the rename operation and continue from that copy.

The Right Solution (TM)

It seems that Zope has a couple of systems to do Virtual Hosting and the best option is the use of the product called Virtual Host Monster, a weird and confusing system (IMHO, of course), that does the job once the right configuration settings are in place.

The best solution to our problem was to modify the requests done by the reverse proxy without touching anything on the Plone site (the original one already had a Virtual Host Monster object installed and that was the only thing that we needed to add).

The nginx configuration for the new /web path is the following:

  location /web/ {
    proxy_pass http://plone:9673/plone/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_web/;
    include    /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
  }

With this change, when the user asks for anything under the /web/ path the Zope server gets the contents traversing the /plone object and adding to it the elements that appear after the VirtualHostRoot component, ignoring components that start with the _vh_ prefix (the protocol and host name of the requests are not modified, as we did not touched that).

Once the object is found, the server rewrites the URLs included on the HTML files using the path components that appear after the VirtualHostRoot one, including the suffix of the components that start with the prefix _vh_.

For example, when the Zope server receives a request for an URL like:

  http://plone:9673/plone/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_web/home

it publishes the content found on:

  http://plone:9673/plone/home

but the HTML files returned assume that their base URL is:

  http://plone:9673/web/home

Today I've noticed that my last post was on August and I've decided that I'm going to try to keep this blog alive.

Since this summer I've left the University and now I only have two jobs... my daily work and my son; I believe that things are going better at a personal level, but the truth is that lately I have near zero time to devote to Debian and Free Software in general.

As I don't want to leave the FLOSS world and I'm still able to do some sysadmin related tasks at work and at home I've decided that I'll try to reserve some time for blogging about them.

I'm also thinking about starting a blog and a wiki in Spanish, mainly to be able to publish some of the documents I write at work about our installations, the advantage for me is that I can publish them with a little revision and that is much faster than translating them into English.

Anyway, before creating new blogs my first task is to finish my home server migration; I'm moving all the services that were running on my old PowerBook (PowerPC @ 400Mhz, 378MB of RAM, 10 GB HD) to my other PowerBook (PowerPC @ 1Ghz, 768MB of RAM, 60GB HD), as I haven't used it for ages and I still use a lot the old machine.

On the move I plan to change a lot of things, the machine is going to run multiple vservers and I plan to change a lot of the software I was using, always trying to simplify the maintenance and/or get more performance from the new machine:

• The internal network will use dnsmasq for DNS and DHCP (replacing bind9 and the dhcp3-server).

• My authoritative nameservers are going to be served by powerdns using the named backend for the primary servers and sqlite3 for the secondary domains.

• I'm going to move all my webservers from apache2 to nginx and fast-cgi (the speed and memory gains are huge at work).

• I plan to move all my repositories from Subversion to git, including this ikiwiki installation.

I'll try to blog about this new installation once it is done.

I'll be 0x24 (hex) or pow(6,2) (dec) years old next Sunday and it is becoming obvious that I need to change my lifestyle.

On the physical side I'm sure that I have to loose between 20 and 30 Kg. if I don't want to have health problems in the future. The plan is to change my eating habits and do sport regularly. The basic idea is to do a diet seriously and keep part of the rules more or less forever (that's the habits change); the other important thing is to do some exercise, I've never liked sports too much, but I'm sure I can try to walk some days and swim others (I've been going once a week to the swimming pool during the last months and I'll be doing it twice a week starting this September).

On the mental side, I need to reduce my obligations and care less about the work problems in and out of the office.

To reduce my obligations and have more free time I decided a couple of months ago that I was going to leave the Uni, as it was taking away a lot of time that I can use for more important things; I notified it and after this September I won't be working for the Universitat de València anymore.

Initially my idea was to keep my main work and use some hours each week to work on my PhD Thesis, but the truth is that I'm not interested anymore; I don't have anything specially interesting to say and my main motivation for getting a PhD has also disappeared (at some point I thought about becoming a full time University professor, but after three and a half years I've had enough, at least for a looong while).

This leaves me with my work at the ITI as my main and only work, but after some months I'm seriously considering leaving it also.

My main problem there is that I believe that I'm starting to suffer the Peter Principle or something similar; almost all my professional career I've been working as a technician, first as a programmer and sysadmin and lately as analyst and team leader or technical manager, but now, as it seems to happen always in the Spanish IT companies, I'm being forced to move to a pure project management work and, to be fair, I don't like it.

I don't know if that means that I'll get to my level of incompetence, but if that is the case I think I'll have to try the Peter's Parry, that basically means to refuse a promotion (I've already done it asking to get a place under my theoretical level, although not on a convincing manner, it seems) or use the Creative Incompetence technique, that is, give the impression that you have already arrived to your incompetence level (probably it is too late to do that at my current place, but maybe on the next one I'll be able to do it).

Maybe this is not the last level of the Peter Principle, as I'm sure that I can and will do this work (I'm thinking about moving, but I will not do it until I have a plan for the future, and that will probably mean a new job), but I'm also sure that I will never do it as well as I can do technical tasks because I don't have any real motivation to do it and while I plan to get the skills needed, they are not attractive to me.

I understand that on the current IT world we need to have project managers, and I really hate bad managers, but that does not mean I like to become one, I prefer to be a team leader and work only on one or two projects at a time, instead of having more than five and not do real work in any of them; my main problem is that the challenges and tasks a manager has to do have nothing in common with the things I like from computer science and I'm too perfectionist to handle people that does not care about how things are done in a lazy way (a team leader with a couple of projects can handle technical people, when you are a manager with multiple projects you miss the day to day perspective and problematic people is more difficult to handle).

Oh well, we will see how things evolve. The good thing is that I believe that one way or another I'll end up having a better life and, if I'm able to care less about my own work (and the one done by others) maybe I'll be able to stay at an acceptable level on the hierarchy without getting burn out and maybe some day I'll be able to work again on the things I like and keep my promises.