I have been a fan of open source software, specifically Linux for a long time now. Even when I earned my living through Windows, I loved playing around with Linux. Till recently I did not play with any open source applications and open source was becoming just a hobby. Some time back one of my colleagues showed me two products called Zope and Plone. I thought at first those are goofy names for products and didn't think much of it.

I was planning to launch my website for a long long time now. But I never had enough time, resources or skills to do it. I slowly developed it and then one day I launched my website. And guess what I am using? A part of LAMP architechture, Linux, Apache (front-ending Zope and Plone), Python and I am loving it.

Recently I started putting photos on the website. But the functionality was not good enough. Some products were broken (CMFPhotoAlbum and CMFPhoto) and some didn't work. But Plone 2.1.2 has builtin support for handling photos (more about that later), but it was not providing me with navigation links and when I chose different view method, it used to give me an error. I fought with it for two days without success, then I gave up and registered myself onto SourceForge.net and put in a request for help. I received replies almost instantaneously and I worked with Matt (I don't know his full name, but I suspect he is from New Zealand) and he pointed out that there was a bug in the system (Yes!! I found out a bug) and he suggested a fix which worked like a dream.

I will be soon submitting (like today) a bug report to the Plone development team and I hope to contribute to open source software movement as soon as I finish learning Python and plone programming. What amazed me was the speed and the quality of response I recieved from Matt and the overall open source community.

Ok granted that the open source products are not mature and may have many bugs, but the support that you get from the community is amazing. And this too from people who work in the spare time and do not stand to gain financially or otherwise. The entire thing took me less than 24 hours to resolve. I would be surprised if I get the same turn around time from proprietary vendors.

In my attempt to host pictures on my websites, I tried out multiple things. From evaluating different products (CMFPhotoAlbum, CMFPhoto, ATPhoto) to installing add-on components to modifying source code. I learnt a lot of things during those two days (nights)  when I was trying to get it working. I initially thought about just posting a note here, but then I thought I won't do justice to the entire content and let my thoughts trail off here. So now I have decided to write up an article on my experiences and learning so that someone else can benefit from it and not waste so much time in doing the same thing.

In a nutshell, the lessons I learnt are:

1. Plone can handle photos natively since v 2.1. Just change the view from standard to thumbnail.
   
2. You need PIL / JPEG support installed on your linux computer / python compilation for it work
3. There is bug in the ArcheTypes product in the way plone renders the image using the image_view or atct_album_image viewing method. More on that later.
4. If you are stuck anywhere, ask the experts. Open source community is so much helpful and forthcoming, it would be a waste not to ask for help.
   

How easy it is to lose focus of the end objective once you hit a problem? Very very easy if you ask me. As I had posting in my articles over in the Linux category on my attempts to get wireless working on first Ubuntu Desktop and then Fedora Core, I suddenly realised the getting the wireless to work is not what I want. I wanted to test Ubuntu and check it's feasibility in running webserver and support for my current website.

Once I realised that, I stopped my efforts to make wireless work and concentrated on the task at hand. That is to get Ubuntu to run Zope and Plone on my hardware (Dell Latitude D400). Well, Ubuntu desktop was no problem, The installation and setup ran like a charm and the OS was up and running in no time. But I faced major hurdles in getting the Ubuntu Server running. As I have mentioned earlier, the server won't boot up on my laptop and when I tried it using VMWare, it booted up, but the X server was not starting at all. I checked everything I knew and finally gave up.

The Fedora Project has released it's latest offering Fedora Core 6 (FC6) on 24th October. I downloaded it and instead of upgrading my FC4 to FC5, I decided it would be worth my while to upgrade it directly to FC6. Well the installation was easy if lengthy, but a different set of challenges awaited me.

More on that later.

The Fedora project released their newest offering of the linux operating system last week. Roughly 7 months after their last release of Fedora Core 5 which is phenomenal as compared to "You Know Who". The cumulative upgrade is also good apart from the eye-candy changes with respect to the content  and applications included in the OS package. The newer kernel is XEN enabled by default. I understand that XEN was included in Fedora from its Core 3 release, but I never really paid attention to it.

This time it caught my attention during installation with the application support & inclusion to XEN virtualisation. It caught more than my eye when the computer refused to boot up. FC6 uses a PAE (Physical Address Extension) enabled kernel (version 2.6.18-1.2798) and somehow it fails to identify the limitation of the CPU that it is being installed on if the CPU does not have PAE. On booting, the kernel went in to panic with the following message

KERNEL PANIC: Cannot execute a PAE-enabled kernel on a PAE-less CPU!

I tried really hard to recover from this. Even reinstallting the OS and going into GRuB command line to try and load another kernel. But it failed. I could install FC5 and then upgrade to FC6 from there without any issues. The FC5 and earlier versions do not enable PAE. I am yet to check out how FC5 would behave if I put in the same PAE enabled kernel on it. Probably it would faile too.

Anyway, I did not like the idea of giving up on solving this and upgrading from FC5 to FC6. Because, if this is a kernel issue, then I would definitely face this issue sooner of later when I upgraded my kernel so I got books from the library and search on the internet for whatever I could for the kernel and the bug (?) that was troubling me. On searching exhaustively with no results, I finally found something which I felt would work. I knew that I had to set a kernel option. But which one and what?

I found one list on XEN which talked about the same issue that I was facing and it noted that a workaround to the problem I was facing was to use

swiotlb=force

as a kernel parameter when booting. Although it talks about DomU, I was ready to try it on my computer. So I started the installation in rescue mode and at the kernel prompt, I gave this as a kernel parameter and the kernel did not panic. The FC6 went through first boot steps and got me to configure everything and then promptly hung.

It took a reboot to get the computer back on track and start working smoothly. After that it has been working quite nicely and I have done some testing on it that I will post here.

I will also post a detailed installation write-up here in the Technology section.

In a move that surprised many, Microsoft and Novell signed a pact to work together to build products that would work on both OS. This announcement does come a win to the open source community and as a recognition to the growth of the open source community and the users. Finally we would get some good products to work with and perhaps it will increase the Linux adoption rate in enterprises and homes. It seems that Microsoft has finally decided that the only way forward is... together. It cannot go on dominating the IT world indefinitely given the choices that are available in the market.

Or does it really??

I was also very happy to read this the first time, though skeptical. I remember the Microsoft - IBM partnership of the early 1990s to create a single OS with DOS and OS/2. Frankly speaking Microsoft scuttled the relationship and in turn OS/2 and went ahead alone with creating Windows 3.x and the product family of Windows as we know it today. That deal effectively killed OS/2 which was decidedly a better product than MS-DOS and had it not for the deal, we would have a good competing product to Microsoft Windows in addition to Linux.

So is it that Microsoft has decided that it cannot beat Linux just by its products, so it has changed it strategy and trying to kill it (at least one distribution) by same tactics that worked so well with OS/2? Only time will tell. I am sorry if I sound too negative or overly critical of Microsoft. I stand to gain much if Microsoft does good as I make my living on Windows. But from my time in the industry, I have learnt to take anything and everything Microsoft says with a salt of grain.

I hope as much as anyone else that this deal works out as it will be WIN - WIN situation for everyone.

My website runs on Zope + Plone / Apache / Fedora core 4. I am in the process of upgrading the OS to FC6 from FC4. As I have mentioned in my article in the Linux / Technology section, FC6 comes with Zope and Plone included. Till FC5 you had to download Zope and Plone and install and configure it. I had incorrectly mentioned in my earlier article that Zope takes the native root user and password for management. It is not so. You have to create a user account even before you start Zope for the first time. Zope starts without any problems if you try to start it before creating an account. However when you open the browser and go to the Zope page (http://localhost:8080) Zope tells you that you have not created any users and you must create one in order to manage the site. To create an account to manage zope run the following commands from the command shell from root login or su.

#cd /var/lib/zope/bin
#./zopectl adduser <username> <password>

Once the user account is created, you can start the zope instance from the same place with the following command.

#./zopectl start

In the previous versions and combinations, I had tried to make the zope as a service and start at the time Linux started. Since I am not a Linux expert, I could not do it at that time easily without writing a script. This time Zope is tightly integrated with the OS and it is included in the Service Manager (System --> Administration --> Server Settings --> Services) as a service. You can either start zope from there. You can also check the box next to zope so that it starts up every time I reboot my box.

Once you create the user and can get to the management screen, you can add a Plone site and you are on your way to create a great website.

I finished upgrading my web server to better hardware and latest OS and web server just yesterday. Installation of FC6 was seamless once I found out that I could not run XEN on my computer because of CPU limitations. My CPU does not have PAE on which XEN requires to operate. So finally I figured out that not installing virt-manager solves my problem by installing a non-XEN kernel (Duh!!). So once that problem was out of the way, I moved on to the next task of migrating my web server to the new box.

Migrating a Plone website from one box to another is very well documented. However, there are some things to watch out for which I will post here shortly. After a lot of research and trouble-shooting, I finally managed to get the Zope and Plone working on my box. Since Apache is much more secure, robust and modular in management, I use Apache server as a front-end to my website and use URL re-writing to have Apache forward those to Zope.

Last week I moved my website to the new box and copied the re-write configuration from the old httpd.conf file to the new one and switched off the old one. I did not test Apache functionality trusting that it would work in the new setup, if it worked in the old setup. On trying to access the URL, the browser refused to serve the page instantly throwing up a Error 503 on the screen. At first I thought, it was the new Apache server which did not understand the re-write commands from older (2.0.54) version and tried to find out what had changed. I checked forums, website and even Apache release and change notes, but could not find anything that could possibly solve my problem. I worked for around 4 hours on a wild goose chase and then gave up. As the site traffic had also returned to normal, the urgency to upgrade was also not there till yesterday when my son kept on switching off the box as it was accessible to him.

So I started my work again yesterday; this time on a fresh FC6 installation inside a VMWare and worked through the Virtual Hosting Monster and re-write tutorial from the Zope book just to make sure, I was doing everything correctly. The VHM was working correctly, but as soon as switched on Apache URL re-write I started getting the same errors. So it was not my configuration file or version issue with Apache. I again searched for the same and this time I was a bit more successful. One of the forums posts mentioned something about the permissions being correct and it lit a light in my head and I knew the problem was not with Apache but with permissions issue. I checked my error log (which I admit I should have done earlier, but since I am not really "expert" in Linux, I didn't do it. Partly because I never thought of it and mostly because I didn't know the location. Anyway.) and found the following entries in the error_log.

[Tue Nov 14 16:03:53 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:04:20 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:22:17 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:26:44 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:26:47 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:28:08 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:28:12 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:45:43 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:47:14 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed
[Tue Nov 14 16:47:17 2006] [error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 127.0.0.1:8080 (*) failed

I checked the permissions on all the folder and didn't find anything that would have caused any problems. Suddenly a thought came to my mind to check the security level issue as I had faced issues with security level (firewall) in the past. The only difference this time being, I disable Linux firewall as I have hardware firewall. So I opened up the Security Configuration screen and started reviewing the SELinux policy settings. As I have already mentioned I am not an expert in Linux, I started experimenting with the SELinux policy for HTTPD Service by enabling one setting at a time and checked if Apache URL re-writing worked or not. The second option I chose to "Allow HTTPD scripts and modules to connect to the network" did the trick and the re-writing started flowing correctly.

I made the similar change in my production web server and happily it started working and I was able to move the website to the new server and switch off the old one. Because I am not an expert in Linux and these things are not documented anywhere, I thought I would add my two cents to the documentation and make Linux a better OS and usable to non-techie guys like me. Now that SELinux is an integral part of Linux (at the Fedora and Ubuntu flavours) I am sure many more people will face this same issue. I hope this will help them to save time and effort that I had to spend to get this issue resolved. If there is a better way of doing this out there, please direct me to it so that I can update my piece and knowledge.

Steve Ballmer speaking at Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle yesterday mentioned that Linux users Intellectual Property for Linux and he sees it as a revenue loss or inhibitor for Microsoft. That was one of the reason they signed a deal with Novell, he said. Steve Ballmer was responding to a question in the question and answer session after his keynote speech at the PASS conference.

Quote Steve Ballmer::

    "We've had an issue, a problem that we've had to confront, which is because of the way the GPL
(General Public License) works, and because open-source Linux does not come from a company -- Linux comes
from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem
for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license
or get economic benefit from our patented innovations. So how do we somehow get the appropriate economic
return for our patented innovation, and how do we do interoperability. The truth is, because of the complex
licensing around the GPL, we actually didn't want to do one without the other."

I agree completely with Steve. Linux users and the community owes Microsoft tremendously. If it had not been for Microsoft we would never have known how NOT to build an operating system. Had it not been for Microsoft, we would never have realised how bad software looks. Had it not been for Microsoft, we would never have known how to secure our systems. So many things to be grateful for. I can't thank Microsoft enough.

If Microsoft seriously thinks that their claims have merit, then why not file a lawsuit, like SCO did? SCO did it even when they did not have anything to substantiate their claims. And since Microsoft is making these claims in public forums, I would rather that they come up with some solid proof pretty soon or withdraw their claims and issue a public apology to the open source community. As far as I think, Microsoft is trying to justify its deal with Novell by making such absurd claims which is seen by some industry analysts as Microsoft selling out on Linux.

Redhat has already declared victory.