Topic: Fixing AFFA

[Arnaud]

Good evening,
I'm looking for a way to contact Michael Weinberger (developer of "Affa" ) in order to have some details related to Affa V3 and SME8.
Does somebody have his email address or know how to contact him?

He is as user by sourceforge.net but I don't know if it is possible to contact him by this way.
As a last solution, I could create a login by sourceforge to try it, but I would prefer not to do this.

Maybe somebody here is already user by sourceforge too and could try to contact him for me....

Thanks in advance.
Bye
Arnaud

[janet]

Arnaud

Looking inside the affa rpm (from 2009) at the Vendor details,  I see
Michael.Weinberger@neddix.de
but neddix.de does not seem to resolve, so .....???

Looking at the Assigned to: named M. in bug 7630 I see
mweinber@neddix.de <mweinber@neddix.de>

sourceforge.net might be a better way to contact him
 
good luck !

Edit:
Maybe try neddix.com
see
http://who.is/whois/neddix.com

[Arnaud]

Many thanks Janet,
I will try.............
Bye Arnaud

[ReetP]

Good evening,
I'm looking for a way to contact Michael Weinberger (developer of "Affa" ) in order to have some details related to Affa V3 and SME8.

Is there anything particular you want to ask ?

v2.x is no longer supported by him but has been ported across to v8 by the contribs team.

v3 would be good to use but I think when I looked it would need a lot of modification to add in the SME specifics. I'm sure it is possible - just a matter of time and effort.

Any volunteers ?

[Arnaud]

Any volunteers ?

Sir, yes Sir!

Anybody else?
I have a quick "newby" look into both scripts:  I think that it is a feasible job , not something unrealistic.

Should we open an new topic about the adaptation of Affa V3 for sme in order to work on it together?

Bye
Arnaud

[ReetP]

Sir, yes Sir!

LOL

I have a quick "newby" look into both scripts:  I think that it is a feasible job , not something unrealistic.

Should we open an new topic about the adaptation of Affa V3 for sme in order to work on it together?

I guess it ought to go in the bug tracker and followed there. I'll have a look and see what is best.

B. Rgds
John

[idp_qbn]

John and Arnaud
I would like to have a look at the scripts as well, just in case I can dredge up from the murky depths of my mind something useful to addWhere do I get a copy - are they part of the install kit?

Ian

[Arnaud]

Hi Ian,
I don't know if I understand your request correctly...
You can find the script in the rpm of Affa (see wiki for Affa2 and http://wiki.nikoforge.org/Talk:How_to_move_Affa_from_SME-Server_to_a_Server_with_Affa_V3 )
Then have a look in the directory "sbin" after having unpacked the rpm.
Bye
Arnaud

[ReetP]

Regarding this we ought to create a new bug and reference some of the other bugs.

Points to note :

Affa has not been maintained for some while, though there is nothing to stop anyone doing so

It would be best to make sure it works on v9 first and backport to v8 later

There are a LOT of code changes if you diff the two files. I am sure it is possible to do - just needs a lot of time and patience.

It will be better if you work with the current rpm and make your mods and patches with that - if you want help to do this please ask. Building a test dev environment with anonymous CVS is the best way to go - see the wiki. you can then post patches to the bug tracker which will get picked up and you can get a new version built

I can start a new bug if you want one

B. Rgds
John

[janet]

ReetP & Arnaud

Just create the bug report & see what interest people show.
Put a link here for others to see & follow.
A lot of  people appear to be using Affa, so I am sure that work done on improving Affa will be appreciated & used by many.

It's probably a "biggish" job to revamp Affa, but the "rise" feature is unique.

Without wanting to dampen your enthusiasm, if the rise feature is not really needed, then the existing rdiff backup is a good rsync alternative, that also uses CLI for efficient usage over ssh.
Gordon Rowell did the implementation for sme server some years ago & AFAIK is a favoured backup tool amongst sme server professional support personnel.

So maybe take a good look at smeserver-rdiff before expending a lot of energy on a new Affa.

[idp_qbn]

Janet, ReetP and Arnaud

The "rise" feature in AFFA is the main reason I used it in the past.
Very helpful when remotely supporting a system, especially where the users can't really wait until tomorrow for help.

By the way, can we change the subject to something like Fixing AFFA?

Cheers - and thanks for the pointers to the code, Arnaud. At first glance it looks a bit too much for my limited knowledge but hey, ho, we'll give it a good look over the weekend.

Ian 

[Arnaud]

Hello John,
if it is the correct and official way to proceed, than yes, please open a bug for the adaptation of Affa V3 for SME.

SME8 or SME9?? I don't agree totally with you: my target is to have Affa V3 running good with sme8. The reasons of this choose are:
- my installation runs with sme 8 (prod + backup server) and I would need now (or in a near future) an "affa system" I can rely on (my last crash 2 weeks ago showed me once again that backuping is good, but restoring is much better!  )
- I don't know anything about sme9
- sme8 is a stable and current (=used now) version, so let's first adapt a script for it, where we know that problems are coming from the script and not from the sme and then I think that it could be easier to adapt the good running script once again to the sme9, if necessary, when sme9 is stable and we exactly know the differences between sme8 and sme9. IMHO, working on affa and on sme9 at the same time is not so good.

Yes, a lot of things changes between the both scripts - about 65 pages each! - (it seems to be new functions available too), but I don't think that we have to change so much things to adapt the new script to sme. The global structure of both scripts is the same. The way to code has changed ( v2 is easier to understand as v3 for me) but I think that it is irrelevant for things that are not specific to sme.

Yes, of course, some help will be needed  This is the first Perl script I ever read... For example some help to understand how the old script set the default directories to backup when the parameter "SME-server" is selected.....and of course some help to add this to the new script in a proper way.

Bye
Arnaud

PS: I was writing this during the 2 last posts......

[ReetP]

This bug already existed and I suggest you use it as a basis for work on Affa 3

http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7633

Post your questions etc there

Note the bugs re v8/v9 and dependencies. We ought to try and make sure it does work on both but if you want to start on v8 then please go ahead !

I agree that 'rise' is a killer feature and we ought to see if we can keep that for SME.

To develop this, your best bet is to follow instructions on the Wiki to build a test environment.

These are good :

http://wiki.contribs.org/Simple_Package_Modification

http://wiki.contribs.org/Setting_up_RPM_Building_for_SME_Server

Takes a bit of getting used too, but worth it in the long run - you can retrieve the existing Affa rpm from cvs, copy to a new directory and then start hacking ! You can then test build and post proper patches on the track which the devs will review and test for you.

If you have some sort of virtualisation like VirtualBox to test with then so much the better.

I have a virtualbox CentOS6 vdi image with a mock build environment set up which I am slowly uploading to my online server. This is a full CentOS 64 bit image with mock set up on it. If anyone would like a copy then let me know and I can allow you access to it.

I may also set it up as a machine itself on my server and enable some remote access if anyone wants to play. Again, let me know.

If you haven't done already, make sure you subscribe to the dev and discussion lists here as well :

http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/listinfo/

Hope that gets you going

B. Rgds
John

[stephdl]

i agree that you will need virtual environments if you want to test packages but I disagree on the need to have a huge build machine to take in hand....this is what is mock

you can do it simply in a smeserver and set the focus on development.

http://geekeries.de-labrusse.fr/?p=2004

i think that you are french arnaud. once you have learnt how build work you will able to learn about cvs and mock

[nicolatiana]

Not a programmer/developer but an intensive user of Affa.
I put this post to offer my collaboration for testing, discussion ecc..
Many thanks in advance for your work.

Nicola