[BlueOnyx:15572] Re: Updated: demo.blueonyx.it

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Dirk,

> how work for the new Blueonyx is going?
> You wrote in this post a beta will be available in two weeks.
> This would be around the 01.06.2014.
> Did you have trouble with features or any other things?
> What do you think a beta will be available?

Thank you for asking. Let me bring you all up to speed on what's going
on and what the holdup was:

My wife and I got a housing deal offered that we couldn't refuse. It
involved some shuffling around: Selling property, buying property,
moving her parents into a new apartment and then us moving into the
apartment they had moved out of. Including renovation of both places.

That took most of my time in the last four weeks and left me with little
room for commercial work for Solarspeed.net or voluntary work for BlueOnyx.

We finished the moving around 10-12 days ago. Since then we were waiting
for my ISP to change my DSL from block 8 in the same apartment complex
to block 1. All it required was a technician, a screwdriver and maybe
5-10 minutes of time. Hell, we even gave them 8 days advanced warning.
But they couldn't be bothered to do it. Movistar Colombia, subsidy of
Telefonica S.A. - in case someone is wondering. And I'm really well past
caring with that shack.

So that left me with an UMTS-Stick for internet connection and a 4 gig
traffic cap per month. Which lasted three days. Then I went through
another 4 gigs via my cellphone in the days that followed. Those lasted
until another 3-4 days until the traffic cap kicked in as well.

Today we gave up on Movistar and ordered a fibre-optic connection with
another company, which will be installed within the next 14 days or so.
They even went out of their way and borrowed me a LTE-modem until they
can lay the fibre. That modem is supposedly 10Mbit and provides
something like 3Mbit down, 12Mbit up (yeah, these are odd figures!)

But at least I can work with that!

So being settled into the new office, having the internet connection
(more or less) sorted via a workable interim solution I can work in
earnest again.

Actual BlueOnyx progress is this:

Before that unexpected shuffle happened all that was left to do was the
support module, which will provide diagnostics, ability to file feature
requests and support tickets and which provides the interface between
the GUI and the BlueOnyx Wiki. I haven't started on that yet and the
actual amount of work needed will be roughly one week.

However, as I just had finished the really neat looking Active Monitor
graphs and statistics (they're in the demo, too), I got thinking. We do
have the "Usage Statistics" in the GUI, which are a frontent for the
Analog statistics. I already had ported them to the new GUI some months
ago. On the demo or devel boxes I don't have any actual usage data for
email to play with. So I installed the new GUI on a production box
(mail.solarspeed.net). And I was shocked by how utterly useless the
email statistics were.

Well, that has always been the case, but now in the new GUI it's a hell
of a lot more obvious. It has to do with what data Analog sees and at
the end of the day the amount of data that ends up in Analog is below
average and not really that useful.

Take a look at this instead: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sa-report/

It was written by one of those rare Perl-Gods who can hammer out the
neatest code. It provides a Perl based daemon that logs pretty much
anything Sendmail related and provides a frontend for it. The detail of
data gathered and presented there is just amazing.

I checked the code and I love it. Still: The presentation sucks. It's
very useful, but not pretty. But hey, the datafiles it generates are
Perl modules, too. Which he then includes in the script that displays
the statistics. Want the data for May 2014? Just include
/2014/05/cache.pm. Want 13:00-14:00 of 16th June? Include
/2014/06/16/13cache.pm instead.

So I wrote a Perl -> PHP interface for that. "Usage Information" /
"Email" now points to a PHP GUI page that provides the interface for
that. Based on the hour, day, week, month or year you want to see data
for, it calls a Perl script with the parameters for the date and time.
That Perl script includes the respective data-file(s) and JSON encodes
the data-hashes in it and dumps them to the shell. The PHP script reads
these, JSON-decodes the info and presents the data neatly with our UIFC
methods to render tables, pie-charts and graphs. It's a real stunner and
I'm sure everyone will love it.

Here are some quick and dirty screenshots of it:

http://www.smd.net/sastats/

I need 2-3 more days to wrap that up. Then I can start the last missing
piece: The support module. Like said: It'll take a week - give or take a
few days. It's a simple sweat-shop exercise. I have the code already in
my head and just need to hammer it straight into the keyboard.

If nothing else happens, I should be able to start building RPMs in two
weeks or thereabouts. Just to give you all a scope of that: It'll be a
around 800 RPMs for each platform, so that is a bit of work. Especially
considering that the RPM format between 510XR and 520XR needs to stay
compatible, but has to get changed to allow building 510XR and 520XR
RPMs from the same source code tree.

After the RPM's are ready, the OpenVZ OS templates get build. Next after
that will be the ISO images. It is still a lot of nitty gritty work, but
the end is so near that I was jumping up and down in frustration in the
meantime about not having a proper connection to be able to finish it.

Now as you all know: CentOS7 is around the corner, too. I managed to
grab an OpenVZ Beta OS template for it (thanks to Scott Dowdle!). So as
soon as 5207R/5208R are packed up and launched, I'll immediately dive
into BlueOnyx 5209R for CentOS7, too.

On that front I don't expect any big surprises. The new GUI is PHP-5.4
ready (even PHP-5.5 if need be). Piecing together a working Tomcat for
5209R and making our base-ssl module Apache-2.4 ready will be the
biggest obstacles, but shouldn't take more than a few days. There are
only a few platform dependent modules and RPMs that ought to be build.
The rest is pretty much (or will be) ready for whatever OS version comes
along.

So tentative release date for the 5207R/5208R betas will be end of July
and 5209R shortly thereafter. Provided CentOS7 is released by then
(which it most likely will be).

Having said that, let me add this: BlueOnyx with the *old* GUI will not
be made available for CentOS7. At least not by me. I'm not going back
and pain myself with that, as it would be a very major effort for no
gain at all. The new GUI is just superior in all respects. Support for
the old GUI (all platforms) will be reduced to pure bugfixing of really
critical bugs once the new GUI enters public Beta.

Eventually when we have all the bugs squished in 520XR there *will* be a
mandatory update for 5107R/5208R users to the new GUI, so that we can
simply retire it for all but 5106R. I'm willing to push that back until
the end of 2014 if need be, but it'll come.

That will bring the "supported" BlueOnyx versions back from six to a
more manageable four, where three of these four even share 98% of the
same source-code.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber