Planet Bongo

Lance Haig: Linux Live

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:56:13 +0000

On Friday and Saturday I was lucky enough to have gone to Linux Live in Olympia London UK and work the stand with Alex. As Alex has blogged the show was very quiet and it seems the .org village was an afterthought to the organisers.

I think that there was not enough advertising and the show we were paired with was the wrong one as the two user groups had completely different interests and priorities. I saw many a creative user swagger confidently into the area and you can see how his facial expression changes from complete confidence to utter fear step by step as he walks further. When he can’t take it anymore a swift about turn on the heel and almost sprinting he leaves and sighs a huge sigh of relief when he finds himself amongst the apple logos.

This scenario was played out over and over again for the two days I was there. Many of the other OSS people I spoke to were also under the impression that this would be their last excursion into London. This is a great shame as I think LinuxWorld and LinuxLive could have been a great way to bring the communities together.

Now that my rant is over I would like to mention the positive things that I and I think Bongo took from this expo.

I learned that I am actually not petrified of people and talking to them, I actually started enjoying the challenge of finding the expertise level for a interested party and then tailoring the pitch to their level, but when they started talking arrays and memory management etc… I just passed them on to Alex.

Not having a working Web interface was a big stumbling block in the demo stakes as many people were keen to see what it looked like and you can only do so much with the admin interface. J

I learned about the freebie hunter and their mating habits.

Bongo made some great contacts regarding potential collaboration with some big projects out their.

I learned about how great a database postgresql is (it helped that their stand was next to ours)

I also found the angels pleasant to watch as their small hands worked the kinks out of the shoulders of many a client (I still wish I had gathered the courage to book myself a session)

As this was my first outing as an exhibitor I believe I will have much more fun now I know how the other side feels when I go to more of them.

I think the biggest benefit was that Alex and I had many hours in the day to chat about Bongo and just plain shoot ideas at each other (the be honest it was more Alex shooting ideas and me looking stunned or lost), which is invaluable to a project like ours where brainstorming is a key player in what we do.

All in All I was impressed and disappointed at the same time. We need marketing material to hand out we need business cards and we need to have a working solution that we can show people.

Andy it might be time that we resurrect the Bugle again.

Alex Hudson: Bongo at Expo

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:33:00 +0000

So, somewhat little advertised and somewhat exclusive, Linux Live Expo 2008 in London has been taking place. Friday was day two of three; for the first time it's on a Saturday as well - and we'll see how that goes tomorrow, I guess. But the first few days have been interesting.

Thursday started relatively slowly, although Bongo was sited next to the awesome OpenNMS guys - who travelled a lot further than I did to get there, and are exceedingly friendly. They have some interesting ideas about coloured shirts for contributors and stuff like that which I'm very keen on shamelessly ripping off, and Tarus is an incredible ambassador for their project (and the other guys are ok too ;).

Not long afterwards, I hooked up with the amazing Michael Meeks who was dishing up hip-hop hand-grabs like they were Hershey's Kisses, and generally being extremely positive to all in the .Org village. Although Novell as a corporation have not seen fit to bless the Expo with their presence, it's nice to see their more respected engineers about.

In general with Expo, things have been relatively quiet - and somewhat cold & dark, if truth be told - but we've made some interesting contacts with different people and projects, and it does seem like it was very much worth attending. Lance and I will be there on Saturday, and that will be extremely interesting too.

Lance Haig: Over 7000 Downloads

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:56:50 +0000

This evening Stu Gott dropped a bombshell on me, not literally but it had a similar impact. The guys at rPath have run a report on our little project and I was shocked to say the least when I found out that the Bongo appliance has been downloaded 0ver 7000 times. I seem to remember thinking this is a nice small project for me to help the Bongo-Project with, it will never take off as much as the packages that Andrew and the others are creating but will allow me to do my part.

Well to say the least I was sceptical as you can guess but then he pasted these stats for me to look at.

+——————+
| ReportforProject |
+——————+
| Bongo            |
+——————+
+———–+—————–+
| Downloads | ImageType       |
+———–+—————–+
|   2917    | INSTALLABLE_ISO |
|      4    | LIVE_ISO        |
|   1002    | MICROSOFT_VHD   |
|      1    | RAW_HD_IMAGE    |
|   1090    | VMWARE_ESX      |
|   1891    | VMWARE_PLAYER   |
|   1040    | XEN_IMAGE       |
|      1    | XEN_OVA         |
|   7946    | NULL            |
+———–+—————–+
+———–+——-+——+
| Downloads | Month | Year |
+———–+——-+——+
|     15    | 08    | 2007 |
|      4    | 09    | 2007 |
|     40    | 10    | 2007 |
|    384    | 01    | 2008 |
|    821    | 02    | 2008 |
|    732    | 03    | 2008 |
|   1048    | 04    | 2008 |
|   1249    | 05    | 2008 |
|    938    | 06    | 2008 |
|    961    | 07    | 2008 |
|    812    | 08    | 2008 |
|    634    | 09    | 2008 |
|    308    | 10    | 2008 |
+———–+——-+——+

I had to add up the totals myself as I could not believe it was that much. But true to form the total was 7000 which is a great achievement.

I cannot continue on without mentioning the guys who keep this project going I am not going to mention names as I my memory is so bad that I would forget someone. THANKS GUYS!!!!!!!

I feel like I have won and Oscar or something like that.

This has not been a chore to do as I have been learning as we have gone along and without Stu Gott’s help I am sure I would still be pulling my hair out. What shocks me more is that people are downloading us even though we say that it is not quite ready for use yet.

I am sure we will break all types of records when we release version 1.0 and it is something I look forward to. There is still many hours of programming and packaging ahead of us and we will continue doing what we do best looking after our baby as it were.

I almost forgot to add that I want to that all the people who have downloaded The Bongo appliance and also the other packages for being interested and also for trying us out. We are getting better and better.

I have run out of words to say………

Thanks

Andrew Wafaa: Autumnal Tidy Up

nospam@example.com (Andrew Wafaa) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:24:00 +0000

Now that Bongo has passed the M4 release, it is time that the house was brought into order. By 'house' I mean documentation, yes ewww indeed. That laborious and unpleasant task of all projects is needed! This serves multiple purposes: 1) The developers and testers can get to the information easily, and the information is correct; 2) Visitors can get the info they need without having to ask around, not that we mind the questions; 3) It gives the look of professionalism, and completes the overall image of Bongo - a finely honed Adonis of a Mail and Calendaring solution.

Interested? Good. Basically head on over to the wiki and help tidy things up. We have missing pages, incorrect info for installation from source and packages (yes I am guilty of taking my eye off the ball here, sorry), and the list goes on. Nothing is too big, but lots of small things add up If one is feeling adventurous, one could dissect some of the tools/commands and document them a la Man Page. If you have any questions, don't forget you can get hold of people on IRC, post to the forums, or fire a mail off to the Mailing Lists (the devel list is probably best for questions regarding documentation), and if you're feeling highly critical you could file a bug

Please help out, this is one of those miserable tasks that is needed, and ultimately helps the project - an ideal way for someone with no coding skills to contribute.

Lance Haig: Looking to virtualise at home

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:10:33 +0000

Ever since vmware made ESXi a free download I have wanted to install and run it at home so I can P to V my systems at home. And save money on electricity. And before you ask I have looked at the Xen and Virtualbox and Kvm solutions but have found them not quite ready fro my prime time.

I had been running vmware server in the past with reasonable success.

I downloaded an iso of the ESXi installer and dutifully copied all my VM’s to an external disk. When I tried to install esx it complained about not finding a device to install the image on-to.

I initially thought it was the SATA problem so installed an IDE drive to see if that would help but it did not.

I even tried a full ESX3.5 install CD but that also did not work.

So I downloaded Opensuse 11 mini and installed that and vmware server 2 which is actually quite decent and the new web based management is actually quite usable.

I will continue my quest however. But it looks like I will have to get some new hardware. The prerequisites for this is that it must be quiet as the machine stands in out lounge next to the TV and the missus does not want to hear it. I also need 64bit support as I do some dev work for foresight and need that for packaging.

We will see how it goes.

The links below are the ones I currently have looked at. And will add more to the post as I find them or they are suggested.

http://vinf.net/2008/01/14/vmware-esx-v35-on-cheap-pc-hardware/

http://www.theinquisitivegeek.com/2006/11/esx-on-whitebox-as-many-of-you-know-i.html

http://www.techhead.co.uk/building-a-low-cost-cheap-vmware-esx-test-server

Pat Felt: antispam and queue

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:54:30 +0000

so it has been forever that i’ve done any blogging. life has been crazy for the last little bit. I spent the day and finally finished the antivirus fixes that i’ve been wanting to do. it is now basically identical to the antispam agent in how it works. it does not send any sort of a bounce currently though and i’m wondering what the “proper” thing to do is. i suppose that i should send some sort of a note to the destination if the email had a virus on it, however do i do that only if the destination is local?

Other changes that i’ve done are some improvements to the queue. i’ve replaced the locking mechanism that was in the code with a bongohash. it is a ton easier to understand. i’ve also added some debug to the queue to see what is going on with the locking. i plan on adding logging to the anti(spam|virus) agents.

bongo-test.info is running the latest code and is preforming pretty well. my task this week(end) will be to build an smtp bit bucket and have my server forward the mail so that i can test outbound smtp email performance, however inbound is working pretty stinking well atm. i’m on all my usual lists and am up to 12,298 emails. tbird is runing great now with bongo. i downloaded the headers for 2100 emails which tbird sorted great. It took a bit of time, but it worked. i can’t give exact numbers, but i did sort 60 emails in an amount of time that i’d consider reasonable from an end user perspective. i’ll have to run some timings on it shortly.

the other task that i have is to write up a queue email list protocol extension. at least that’s how i was planning on doing it. I was going to add a queue command that would list all the emails currently in the queue following normal queue protocol syntax where it would be 2001-EMAIL INFO though i’m not exactly sure yet how i’m going to format the information. the addition of this command might require a “get me all the information for queue entry x” (though i’m not sure yet what that would even look like). i’d like to get this done as soon as i can since i’m soooooo far behind on bongo coding (and i’m feeling it). i really need to get life under control so i can bongo more