greg haygood

When accessing a Plone site with IE6/7, the browser pops up the following message at the top of the page:This website wants to run the following add-on: ‘MSXML 5.0′ from ‘Microsoft Corporation’. If you trust the website and addon and want to allow it to run, click here…

Plone's security mechanisms are pretty good: very granular and flexible, so you can tailor the site however neded. Strangely, though, if you mark a folder Private, by default the contents within are still visible. Plone's default workflows allow have to be modified to correct this counter-intuitive initial setting.It is posted as a how-to, but rather than searching for it everytime, here's the link. Maybe in a future release this will be fixed in the shipped product.

I landed a contract to setup an intranet for a local company. They had looked at Microsoft's SharePoint, but decided it was way too complex for their needs. So they asked me to help them find something better. I originally planned to go with Drupal, due to its great taxonomy model.

I got Zenoss to gather messages from syslog today. Actually, I had it up a few days ago, but was having a problem that I finally resolved today. We already have a centralized syslog server in the data center using syslog-ng, so everything is hitting the monitor station. So logically it should be easy to feed the messages into Zenoss. But of course it never is. I ran into 2 problems:

I came across ezPublish as a possible nice CMS for use in a couple projects I'm working on, but stumbled when it required PHP4. Rather than downgrading my full Apache2 instance just to test the app, I decided to get both 4 and 5 working on my Ubuntu laptop. Seem to be various ways to do it, but the best (er, first) I found was Windows-specific, so in the interests of fair-n-balanced, here's how I did it on my machine.

There seem to be a number of fancy ways to get Windows machines to send their Events to a syslog server, but for downright simplicity, I chose evtsys from the Purdue Engineering Computer Network. To make it even easier, I added a silent installer on top of it using NSIS so we could deploy through our systems management tools.

I haven't yet figured out how to run custom commands/checks against monitored devices, but I did find the nice way Zenoss watches processes. You can define any string or regex to watch for, and Zenoss will use SNMP to find it in the process list. After the next modeling cycle, it will let you set triggers on the process to tell you if/when it restarts.

I spent part of this morning fighting with Rails, trying to get a quick app I wrote hosted below an existing app. It should have been simple, but getting the various pieces cooperating took longer than it should have. The solution is to use the --prefix argument to mongrel_rails. Here's how I got it going:

Scenario:
RailsApp1 hosted as mysite.com/
RailsApp2 hosted as mysite.com/myapp2
Both apps served via Apache 2.0 + mongrel + pen on Debian Sarge

Scripts:

Today I figured out how to check the various stats that are gathered by Zenoss. Took me a little while to figure out just what it does out of the box, how to turn on the rest, and where to look to see the pretty graphs.

Zenoss announced the release of version 1.1 today. Of course there'd be a new version just 3 days after I installed it! Looks to be very easy: just download the tarball, unpack, and run install.sh. But when I tried that, it died on the version of the python setuptools on the system. The Sarge backports repository only has 0.6a9-0bpo1, while Zenoss 1.1 requires 0.6c1.