[BlueOnyx:19697] Re: Seeking information and demo access

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Jesse,

> I have been looking over your website in order to learn about the
> BlueOnyx distribution. I have run into a few issues and am hoping one of
> you can please help me.

Sure! I'd be glad to help.

> First, I would like to gain access to the BlueOnyx demo server. I tried
> both the http and https addresses and tried each of the example
> accounts. Each time I tried to login, using either Chrome or Firefox,
> the demo simply reloads the login page.

I just tried the demo myself to confirm that it's working. I had no
problems accessing it via Firefox. Could you please try again? I updated
the login details on our webpage to clarify that the passwords indeed
have a "dot" at the end:

http://www.blueonyx.it/index.php?page=live-demo

The dot at the end is what throws most people off. It's probably best if
I change it to something more obvious.

> Second, I tried to subscribe to the News RSS feed. Both my RSS client
> and my web browser reports the feed is not a valid RSS stream. Is there
> another low-traffic mailing list or RSS feed I can subscribe to for
> project news?

I have to look into this. I tried it myself some time ago with various
RSS newsreaders I have on my Linux desktop and had no success either.
Must be a quirk of our CMS. We mainly use the RSS feed for displaying
BlueOnyx related news on the startpage of the BlueOnyx GUI. The GUI
itself has no problems parsing the feed, but it could indeed be that the
format of the feed is different from what a newsreader client would
expect. I'll take a look into that.

> Third, I have tried to install BlueOnyx 5209R. Each time I run the
> installer the system installer locks up and fails while installing the
> dovecot package, after the configuration steps have been completed. Can
> someone suggest a workaround for this issue?

Could you please try again with the latest 5209R ISO? I uploaded it late
last night:

http://updates.blueonyx.it/pub/BlueOnyx/ISO/

The dovecot RPM does some crypto related post-install tasks, which take
a moment to complete. If I recall correctly it's
/usr/libexec/dovecot/ssl-params that's running then.

On slow servers or servers with few CPU cores this can take a bit to
complete. While this is running it appears as if there is little or no
progress. On a quadcore i5 with 2.46-3.5GHz it just takes between 8-15
seconds to complete. But on VPS's that are only allowed access to a
single core I've seen it sit for various minutes.

A possible work around is to press ALT and the function keys to open up
a terminal with shell. If I recall correctly that would be CTRL+ALT+F2
or CTRL+ALT+F3 on a real server. Under various virtualization solutions
it might be different. On Virtualbox for example that would be
Right-Control+F2 or Right-Control+F3.

Once at the shell you could check the process list. If so inclined you
could kill off the "ssl-params" process that happens during the install
of the dovecot RPM. This has no ill side effects, as the crypto setup of
Dovecot will finalize during the first boot of the installed OS in case
ssl-params didn't finish it during the RPM install.

Please let us know if that works for you or what else we can do to help
you out.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber