Yesterday I sent a message to the Nginx list to announce the availability of my first module for that web server.

The module is used to do HTTP Basic Authentication agains PAM instead of using an htpasswd file; I wrote it because I wanted to authenticate against OpenLDAP and PostgreSQL and PAM already has support for that ;)

The code is available here and on the readme there are instructions on how to build a patched debian package with the module included.

As promised a photo of the first meeting between Hugo and Marc.

With luck this afternoon the whole family will be at home.

At 17:55 of the 21th of August of 2008 (four days late from the expected schedule) passenger Marc Talens i Blasco landed at La Fé Hospital in Valencia.

On my next post... Hugo meets Marc!

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.