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.

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.

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.

Moving your website that runs on Zope / Plone and Linux to a different server is documented on the Plone website. However, the article only gives you the information about the files and folders that stores your website information and customisations. What it does not talk about are the practical issue you will face when carrying out the actual migration. I faced those issues and I spent a long time before I could figure out what was wrong. Maybe it was pretty obvious. But obvious things are what we generally tend to ignore while troubleshooting.

To move my website, I stopped my website processes and copied the Data.fs file and the Products folder to ensure that I have all my products and customisations that I made on my website on the old server to be there on the new server. On the new server, I had Zope and Plone configured and running in its native configuration and first tested it out so that I know the installation is working as expected. (By the by, Zope and Plone included with FC6 does not work. There is a bug in Five product. The version 1.3.7 included doesn't work with the package and you need to upgrade to 1.3.8 or later till 1.4.0. Again that does not solve the issue. It has some other errors on which I didn't spend too much time troubleshooting). Again I stopped Zope on the new server and backed up the Data.fs. file and Products folder on the new box before copying over the production files. (Although you don't have to really backup the files on the new server, its a good idea if you have to roll back for any reason and do some testing).

Note: You don't really have to stop the Zope processes before coying the files to or from the Zope instance, but I would strongly recommend that the process be stopped so that there are no hooks attached to the files while you are copying from or to the Zope instance.

Once I had copied over the new data files, I restarted Zope and tried to access it. Although the process was running, even the Zope welcome page refused to display in the browser. I did a lot of research on some high tech stuff but did not find any solution for my problem. At a sudden inspiration I ran the ls command with the -l switch and saw that the owner user and group for the Data.fs file was root and not plone. I checked in the old server and the owner and group was plone. So then I proceeded to change the owner of the file to plone. I checked the Products folder also and saw that the owner again was root. To change the owner of any file or folder I used the following command.

chown -R plone:plone Products
chown plone:plone Data.fs

The -R switch changes the owner on all folders and files below the top level folder so that I am now able to change the permissions in one shot.

Once that was done, I started my server again and found that it was working. And thought that all was OK. Apparently it was not. Zope started correctly, but when I tried to view my website, I got an error AttributeError: isDefaultPageInFolder. On looking at the log and searching the internet, I found out that the error was coming from global_defines.pt portlet which exists in the Products/CMFPlone/skins/plone_templates folder. Apparently this portlet has been modified in the latest release of Plone from the version that I was running (v2.5) and that was creating problems. I simply copied over the new file on the old one from the earlier backup that I had taken. Secondly the older Five product is not compatible with the new Zope release and you have to use the newer Five. Again I simply copied over the newer Five folder from the backup to the production location (See, I told you it was a good practice to backup before you make changes).

Once this copying was over, everything started working fine immediately. I don't think this is documented anywhere although there are some tickets in some support forums. However, you can spend a lot of time looking for the correct answer. I thought I would add my two cents to the open source community.

Last week when I was doing another Linux FC6 installation, I came across a very peculiar bug. I have never seen one like this since I started playing with Linux. In the middle of the installation the Anaconda installer just popped up an error message that is shown in the adjoining picture (Excuse the picture quality as it is taken directly from the monitor using a digital camera). Funnily enough I was using a DVD based installation so it should not have asked for a disc in the first place.

Then I thought that maybe it is because the installer is not able to read some files off the disc. I removed it, cleaned it thoroughly and inserted it again. Still no luck. It gave me an Wrong CDROM error message the next time around. I had to cancel the installation and restart the process entirely. Which meant a rework of around 1 hour because I had heavily customised my Fedora installation with a lot of tools and products to test and work with.

Normally it should not be a big problem though. However the installer needs to improve a lot in the sense that it should recognise whether the user is using a DVD or set of CD-ROMs to install. That should not be a tough thing to do. When I start the installation, regardless of whether it is DVD based or CD based, depending on what I choose, it tells me which CDs I need. Well why should I be told that if I am using a DVD for installation? Not only is this annoying, it also does not appear professional.

Secondly, about the error I just mentioned earlier; it would certainly help if the installer could catch the exception and give out a better message giving the user correct information about the actual error rather than such a misleading and obviously incorrect message.

So we finally moved into the new DST without major hiccups. I heard that some of the computers and servers failed to obey the patch, but that's it. The major issue I guess was calendar client, specifically MS Exchange and Outlook. We have a user whose appointments were off the schedule by a full three hours after the switch to the new DST today. It seemed hard to digest that the DST change (which affects the clocks just by 1 hour) would cause a shift of three hours. On further investigation and asking around I found out that this was not the only case. There were reports of similar incidents and this presumably affects only the traveling users whose time zones change quite frequently.

Microsoft had kindly provided a tool to update the mailboxes at the Exchange Servers which required minimal user intervention. In our environment, we had opted to update the non-recurring appointments at the server level and leaving the update of non-recurring appointments to the end users. I know it sounds strange as the tzmove.exe tool provided by Microsoft to update Outlook client does not differentiate between single and recurring meetings and it ends up as redundant work. That's the way managers work. Incidentally, this particular user who is a heavy traveler was in the west coast at the time of patching and his timezone was registered as PST during the patching. Whereas in reality he is a east coast user. Most probably that is what caused that issue. And I had to update the Exchange server again to update only his mailbox with his timezone changed to Eastern time.

I don't know whether that fixed his issue or not, but I haven't heard anything back from him yet. As they say, no news is good news.

On the other hand, I use Linux FC6 on my office laptop (as an experiment of course) and on my home web server that is hosting this site. I did not even get time to run any updates on them and I suddenly thought of it on Sunday after the change had happened. I don't even login to the web server. When I checked my server I was so glad to see that it had correctly identified the time zone change and it had the new DST setting built into the OS. Of course Windows Vista and Office 2007 both have the new DST settings so I didn't have to do anything to my Vista machine. But then that raises the question, why was this not taken care in an earlier patch? Why there is always the last minute rush which makes lives of IT support as miserable as it can get.