With all the little intraweb apps we seem to be tacking on lately, I think we should develop some basic guidelines or a css style sheet of what the default colors, fonts, etc we should use. Otherwise, I think the user experience for these programs won’t be optimal, as each app will feel unfamiliar and users will resist using them, because it seems like ‘another thing to learn.’
Thems my thoughts.
Scuttle is del.icio.us style social bookmark sharing. When you want to add a bookmark, you get a little button in your browser to bookmark a site with, and your bookmark appears in the shared pool. The key to this is you can add a ‘tag’ to your bookmark, so you can look at sites via tag category.
The cool thing is it’s open source, so you can host your own copy of it. I’m thinking this might be another way to crack collected knowledge free from it’s individual keepers, and distribute it throughout the organization. Also, it’s just a good way to cut down on email, no more: “Did you get the link I emailed?” type situations.
A developer just showed me an interesting framework to produce python-backed sites VERY quickly. This is mainly for you Ian, it natively supports AJAX as well. Here’s the link:
http://www.turbogears.org/
I watched the demo, pretty interesting.
In addition to a bouncing off point, I really want to see start.yjusa.com become an aggregator of useful information; a dashboard for the info you need in the company.
The trick to this is RSS. If we can assemble valid RSS feeds from important data sets, it’s easy enough to pump those into the intraweb homepage, and allows uers to turn on & off what they want to see.
As a first step, I am really intersted in integrating the updates RSS feed from yjusa.grouphub.com into start.yjusa.com. I found the Magpie PHP RSS Library which can be used to do this, though there are probably other PHP RSS libraries out there (the tricky thing about that feed is it requires SSL authentication, which Magpie supports).
I am thinking once Compiere is up and in use, we can periodically have a script that taps into it’s database connection, downloads intersting data, and coverts it into RSS feeds. Then users can decide if they want to subscribe to the “Todays Orders” feed or whatever we dream up.
The only trick to this is that we would need one consistent login scheme, with a cookie to remember the user’s login. I guess this is the first step.
Thoughts?
I have a feeling we will shortly be deploying many Linux servers to perform certain actions. Maybe we will implement Asterisk to be used as a VoIP interchange between locations, maybe the backup servers will be Linux based, maybe the BDCs.
One thing that could speed up implementation at remote sites is to build live cds for certain purposes. For instance, on the file server in PDX to keep updated live cds for certain projects. Like, a BDC live cd or a backup live cd. Already setup with the most current packages (or scripts to fetch+install them). So when we get to the site we just put the CD in, click or type “load” and poof, the server is installed and configured.
These links (haven’t read all of the process) may be helpful:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7233
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_build_a_LiveCD_from_scratch
We don’t want to have a billion servers each doing their own task — so what can we use as a solution? Server virtualization (or semi-virtualization or para-virtualization). This involves cutting down a server into mini servers that each have full customization. Our VPS at hostmysite is like this. So why would you want to do this? A few reasons actually.
-Localize exploits. Let’s say DNS gets exploited — the access gained would only be for DNS, and not for mail and web and everything else.
-Easy “upgrades,” backups and redundancy. Let’s say we start to use MySQL more and more, but the server can’t handle it. To upgrade (ignoring replication for this example) we could just turn off the virtual server (in essense lock files), move it to other server, drop it into another server that is setup to do virtualization, and turn it it on. Nearly no downtime, and you know it will work.
Anyhow, worth looking at. Here are some of the most mature linux virtualization packages out there:
http://openvz.org/ — This is the open source version of hostmysites VPS. The main difference is it isn’t setup for doing mass hosting (like, 1000 VPSs on a huge mainframe).
http://www.openvps.org/
http://linux-vserver.org/ — Very plain website, but there is news that the authors are pushing for this code to be included in the Linux kernal natively.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ — I’ve heard rumors also about this being one of the most advanced.
http://www.vmware.com/ — The one and only. This is full virtualization so will contain the most overhead (some of the previous packages have almost no overhead, not even 1%). Oh yea, and this “costs” money.
I thought I should post this for the record, as it’s a problem I’ve run into before, and I managed to find a weird workaround.
If you try to create two mapped network drives from a Windows PC to the same Linux Samba server, when trying to map the second drive you will get an error (don’t have the error off hand, something about multiple connections not allowed).
This appears to be a limitation with Samba. To get around it, map each by a differnt hostname. That is, edit the computer’s host file or the server DNS so that say…myserver.yjusa.com myotherserver.yjusa.com both just go to 10.0.4.19.
Then map your drives as \\myserver.yjusa.com\SharedDocs and \\myotherserver.yjusa.com\Accounting. This somehow tricks windows, and allows you to establish multiple connections.
I think eventual we are going to switch everyone’s email to IMAP. When we do, we should consider RoundCube webmail as our webmail app. It’s way better than anything else I’ve seen, and it’s interface is slick and way ajax’ed out. Of course, it’s opensource.
RoundCube Webmail
Screencasting is recording a movie of a computer screen, and then usually adding audio narration to it. It can be pretty useful for creating demos and tutorials.
I found a site that reviews all the common screencasting software on the market. Not much love for the mac I’m afraid, dah well.
Ian found this originally, but my pen-testing cousin just send me the link as well. p2p VPN, w00t. Hamachi is a VPN alternative that does not have the normal router problems associated with IPSEC and PPTP vpns. That is good because of firewalls and nat and things like that. (Even though I don’t think PPTP has huge problems with VPNs, since it is based off PPP).
http://www.hamachi.cc/