Brett Sheffield . com

One of the more interesting things I was involved in over the summer was Social Innovation Camp. In addition to donating a year’s hosting to the winners (MyPolice), Gladserv provided infrastructure support through the weekend. It was barely controlled chaos, but great fun. Esther & I were running about, tunneling people out of the university network, registering domains and creating virtual servers.

One of the projects we became more involved in was FixTheBuses. They needed an SMS message interface to be able to send and receive text messages from people at bus-stops. We managed to get that going (thanks to Anand Kumria for help here), and the rest of the team put together a system that actually works.

I’m really pleased to be able to support a venture like SICamp, and I hope we can be involved again.

A short video of the weekend is now online.

The new Scottish Open Source Awards website is being launched at tonight’s Techmeetup in Edinburgh. Organised by Greg Soper of Sales Agility, Scotland’s CRM Experts, the Awards are now well established with 2009 marking their third year.

My hosting company, Gladserv, was shortlisted in 2008 with the award for Open Source Excellence going to Edinburgh’s Wolfson Microelectronics for their contributions to the Linux kernel.

This year I’ve been invited to join the judging panel, and I look forward to seeing some quality submissions for this year’s Awards.

If you know any companies in Scotland who have made remarkable contributions to F/L/OSS, please nominate them for an award.

Once again, the Scottish Open Source Awards were held as part of the Scottish Software Awards dinner at the Radission SAS in Glasgow. Thanks to Sales Agility for organizing the Awards again for the second year.

My company, Gladserv was shortlisted for the Open Source Business Excellence Award, which went to Wolfson Microelectronics. Fair enough - amongst other things they have a full time Linux kernel developer on staff!

What I found interesting was that none of the shortlisted entries for the Open Source Business Excellence Award were software companies. Two are IC companies: National Semiconductor and Wolfson. And then there’s Gladserv, a Hosted Services and Infrastructure company. We all use and develop software in our business, but software is not our business.

This got me thinking. Gladserv doesn’t publish a lot of code, which isn’t itself a problem. However, we publish a lot less code than we write. Our arrangements with our clients mean that everything we write is available under the GPL, but that’s not a lot of good if it never makes it onto an ftp server. We need to do better, and in 2009 I plan to make sure we do. Along with testing and documentation, publishing needs to become a standard part of our development process.

The deadline for registration as a system builder under the WEEE(EEY) legislation is today. ie. If you’re building and selling your own systems or rebranded hardware, you’re meant to join a scheme and then pay wodges of cash to ensure environmentally friendly disposal of your systems when they end of life. This doesn’t apply if you’re reselling someone else’s branded systems.

The legal stuff:
http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file35992.pdf

http://www.dti.gov.uk/innovation/sustainability/weee/page30269.html

Now our penguins are safe.

Anyone looking for amusement should head to their nearest computer shop and ask if they’ve “registered for WEEE”. Photos of the resultant facial expressions should be sent to me. Prizes awarded.

The versions are coming thick and fast. Seems I’m not the only one who was busily working through the holidays. This time its listed on the the exim site. A few bugfixes from 4.64 & 4.65.

I’m up to my elbows in various projects at the moment, rebuilding my MTAs being one of them. I’m converting my old sendmail/postfix MTAs to exim and separating out the functions onto different Xen virtual machines. Where possible, for maintainability, I like to stick with pre-rolled Debian packages unless I have a reason not to do so. Exim is one case where I like to roll my own.

Much of the exim config is best built into the binary at compile time. One example is logging. Exim needs to know where to write logs before it reads its config (in case it needs to log the fact that it can’t read its config). If you want to log to a non-standard location (or use syslog), then you need to tell exim at compile time. You will also need to compile from source if you want to specify which user exim runs as or if you want to compile out unused transports and lookups for security/performance reasons.

Fortunately, exim is pretty easy to put together, and local makefiles are mostly transferable from one version to the next so its easy to maintain your own package. I run three separate daemons for the external mail exchanger (mx), local delivery (mailstore) and outgoing smtp. Building and maintaining these is straightforward - I’ll be putting a how-to up on this site in the next week or so.

Philip Hazel announced a new release of Exim a week ago:

The Exim website still says 4.63 is the current version, but the mirrors seem to have 4.64 in stock.

I’ll get busy building a deb package for Xen/Debian Etch.

Gladserv’s new server is live. It will be about a week before is it fully configured and ready to come into service. It is being set up using Xen, with separate virtual servers for each major service.

Presently we run a primary server and a backup server, both installed without the benefit of virtualisation. Once the new box is in service, each of these servers will be rebuilt using Xen so that services can be separated, both for security and flexibility. We can then share the load evenly between the servers and ensure that any single server outage will not be noticable to our clients. A full backup is not the same as full redundancy. I’ll definitely sleep easier when this is all in place.

I’ll document this process more fully in a separate article.