MondoRescue.org and Project-Builder.org infrastructure update

I took the opportunity of a Data Center planned shutdown to do a task a reported way too long: migrating my existing old TC4100 NetServer which was hosting the projects I’m working on in our Solution Center to a much less obsolete ProLiant system with much more capacities.

I also updated the underlying distribution to the latest Mandriva 2010.2 (Mageia is still not ready for production usage), and seeing that trac, my main tool of choice for helping e manage these projects, was still at version 0.11.x, I decided to look at cooker, take the latest 0.12.1 and backport it on to my system (python-genshi was also needed).

Was not too complicated, as long as you follow the upgrade guidelines for trac. In short do upgrade, wiki upgrade and repository resync ‘*’. I also took that opportunity to have a single instance of trac to manage the 3 projects in a consistent way, sharing at maximum what could be. Notice the new [inherit] possibility provided in the trac.ini file as an easy way to do it.

Lots of new features are provided now ! Inerface is still very nice and performant (well new HW helps as well 😉 Once the WebAdmin plugin has been installed and the trac.ini files cleaned up, I was at work again, with a much more maintainable environement. So kudis to the trac team here !

The Web sites and FTP services are working just fine, but I still need to work on re-enabling Sympa to be completely operational.
Last item I really need to look at is a way to reduce spam in tickets and wiki pages, so the captcha method seems to be the way to go. Other ideas welcome !!

So most of my Debian friends or Fedora friends would argue with me why I’m still choosing Mandriva for that ? Well the answer is for me simple: it provides all the tool I need to do what I have to do on that machine. Which means in addition to the services already mentioned, creating yum repo (createrepo is there), or for dpk (dpkg-scanpackage and apt-ftparchive are also there) or for urpmi (genhdlist is also there. And except Mageia, I don’t know of any distribution that would allo wme to do that.

And anyway, if it’s not in it, I just have to add it 😉 And the Mandriva/Mageia ecosystem is still IMHO the most friendly to receive contributions. So, even if the future may be seen as uncertain, it’s still fo me the way to go.

Services are nearly all back online, so thanks should go to my HP colleagues, the Solution Center for hosting, the trac, vsftpd, Apache, Sympa and Mandriva teams. Please use the projects, report bugs, write documentation, share and enjoy !

Tags: HP, Linux, Mageia, Mandriva, Mondorescue, project-builder.org, ProLiant, trac