So we are going to try and post a bit more regularly on the goings on at Koozali to keep people up to speed and get a bit more engagement here.
As you may know, we do a lot of development chat on our Rocket.Chat server. If you want a login please ask. We do jokes and general news as well
By all means comment on this post - or open a separate thread.
Hot news. Windows.....
=================You may have seen that Microsoft has decided to make life hard for Windows sysadmins by breaking stuff.
We have been waiting for a patch from upstream Samba -> RHEL -> CentOS. So far they have patched RHEL 8 & 9, but not RHEL 7 which SME 10 is based on. We think RedHat may be playing hard to get and trying to shift people from 7 to 8/9.
In the meantime we finally took the decision to build a patched version of Samba. See this post for details
https://forums.koozali.org/index.php/topic,55017.msg289932.html#msg289932Our reluctance to do this ourselves stems from the facts that a) it is a complex package to build and b) it has huge security implications if we get it wrong. We are a very small team and already have more than enough to cope with, so trying to maintain something like this is a non trivial exercise. We hope that this helps admins out there.
A lot of the work on this was done by community members bunkobugsy and yythoss. They are owed a big thank you.
CVS and build system
===============So the build system for Koozali SME is quite a trick bit of kit.
It brings in upstream packages, and our own packages, and mixes it all up and spits it out as updates for you.
Our own packages are held in CVS and the build system automatically takes any changes and builds new packages for us. It saves a lot of work.
However, it is getting long in the tooth. Some of the software is old and unmaintained. CVS has been overtaken by git. The code that is 'buildsys' itself is a seething morass of code where few dare to tread, and there are newer tools out there.
So for the past several months briand and have been bashing their heads against the wall trying to migrate us to brand new build system using git/gitea/koji and some other bits.
At the same time they have also renamed a lot of old packages from e-smith to smeserver for consistency and had a huge tidy up of a lot of code. It is still a work in progress but they have progressed well. Ask us for more details or if you want to help in any way!
SME 10 -> SME 11
==============We have debated the base for the next version of Koozali SME.
It all seemed pretty clear to move to Rocky. However, the recent IBM/RedHat shenanigans have given us a little pause for thought and reflection. See this thread for more:
https://forums.koozali.org/index.php/topic,54512.0.htmlWe still lean towards Rocky but there may well be legal action by various parties that might affect this.
We maintain a close watch and will keep you all posted on developments. Please add your thoughts to the thread.
We also think there is a possibility that due to the way that RHEL 8 & 9 are built we may be able to almost build two versions at the same time. Jumping straight from 7 -> 9 may well be too big a jump for some people due to hardware requirements so we need 8 as a bridge. Again, we will let you know how things progress here.
We expect to start building test versions at the end of the year (Once JP has finished the building work at his home!). Please try them and help as much as you can.
Spamassassin 4
============So we have had Spamassassin 4 built and testing for several months. I stupidly decided to have a go at building this some while back and have managed to get it all running. We think it is OK to release and you should see it arrive shortly. Please let us know if you have any issues!
https://bugs.koozali.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12330https://bugs.koozali.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12330
cvm-unix
=======OK, this is a cute issue.
You may have seen errors in your logs like this:
cvm-unix[13072]: segfault at 0 ip..... https://forums.koozali.org/index.php?topic=54571.0This is caused by a failed attempt to login as group or other non standard user. It trips up cvm-unix and causes it to restart. cvm-unix is written in C and no longer supported. We did look to see if we could fix it, but it is a non trivial job. We are not C coders. We can see where the issue is, but fixing it is another thing, and it is a security issue.
The only thing that it handles now is imap logins so I decided to have a look at alternatives and saw that there was a imap authentication plugin we could possibly use with s/qpsmtpd.
We have had this running on both test servers, and then real world servers, and it seems to work well. The update was released a couple of days ago and should be with you now.
smeserver-qpsmtpd.noarch 0:2.7.0-12.el7.sme
You should be able to use SSMTP only without issues now.
Please let us know about any problems.
Server-Manager replacement
======================So our server manager which has served us all well for years is finally getting some love.
First, it uses a library called FormMagick to build panels. This is very old, and very out of date. It has a number of issues which we would like to clear up, but a rebuild of the entire server-manager is non trivial.
Charlie Brady suggested some long while ago using a perl framework called Mojolicious to build a new server manager.
You can get some Mojo here:
https://mojolicious.org/It is a serious bit of kit. It uses templates to be able to build html to build a web front end. I built some really simple code a few years back as a demo. I added AdminLTE as a bootstrap theme over the top of the basic html:
https://adminlte.io/themes/v3/Since then Brian and Michel having been slaving over hot keyboards. Server-Manager 2 can be installed on a test VM to play with. Please let us know if you would like to play and help test!
IPv6
===Ah this one.
https://bugs.koozali.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6393https://wiki.koozali.org/IPv6This is tricky as a lot of us do not have IPv6 yet. I'd do a bit more but best I can do is a Hurricane tunnel currently.
This again is a non-trivial task. We are not ignoring it as some think, but it is a big job and we some of us do not have the facilities to test easily.
If anyone has an IPv6 connection and wants to help then please contact us.
It needs IPv6 basic support added as per the wiki and then each service needs to be configured, and then it will need that configuration adding to templates and then the backend perl and server -manager need to have IPv6 support added as well.
Basic testing and trialing services for configuration options will be a big help - see the wiki for details. Be VERY careful about exposing your SME server to the wider IPv6 world!!
Joining in
======We are an open source community. You do not have to be a coding guru to help. Testing is one of the biggest tasks that needs help with and anyone can do it - it just needs a bit of time.
Is there anything you would like to know about the people behind Koozali?
Is there anything else you would like to see us do?
I did suggest before about a webinar so you can talk to us - I will revisit this soon.
We'd love to know more about our community too so do please tell us a bit about yourselves and you setups as well!!
Quiz
===How many active developers are actually writing code at Koozali?
1 Replies
536 Views