Wastebug

Still here (luckily)

2022-05-26T19:24:06+00:00

I’m still here, luckily; both with and without a pun. Shortly after the last update, not more than a few days, I was not feeling well. Things deteriorated quite quickly and I tested positive for COVID19. Now, more than nine weeks later, I’m still recovering.

Even while being very careful from early February 2020 up until now. I’ve been very careful indeed. The knowledge that I’ve never reacted well to illnesses is a good motivator. As soon as the first vaccinations became available, I realized how dangerous the world could become. I predicted risky behavior under the vaccinated. Having had multiple adverse reactions to vaccinations before I could not take the risk to get vaccinated myself. And I was right and wrong. The risky behavior came true, both by the vaccinated and by people just having enough of all the COVID measures.

I probably got infected with the Omicron strand at the supermarket. About a short week before I fell ill, a woman was coughing in the faces of people and over the groceries.

I’m still exhausted and still in pain.. The upcoming week I’ve got an appointment at the hospital to have a hypopharyngeal echography taken. I’m very lucky. Both heatwise, but also having a great team supporting me.

First real commits and PostgreSQL

2022-03-17T16:45:06+00:00

First fruits of my labor from the last few weeks are here! In between all my other projects and administrative tasks, I’ve managed to get to a point that I can commit the first new code to GitHub. This is the result of about a dozen commits to our CVS server, running diffs, merging changes and reviewing the code.

In the meanwhile I’ve been setting up a PostgreSQL test server. We’ve got multiple database servers, but they are all MariaDB 10.3 and 5.5. The last time I did something with PostgreSQL was about 15 years ago and I’ve never installed and configured one. I can say, the design is strange and out of the box it poses a huge security risk if a single server (or cluster as they call it) is used for multiple (web)applications. It’s good practice to use different credentials for different databases. This way data stored in for instance Wastebug cannot be exposed through a co-installed Magento install.

PostgreSQL uses roles that per default are mapped to Unix user accounts (peer and ident authentication). This is great at the CLI as an administrator or developer. With MySQL and MariaDB each time you want to do something in the database you must supply a username and password. With PostgreSQL this is only done once, by logging in to the host machine. For traditional applications this is not a problem. You can run your calendar server under a different unix account than your network monitoring server. But with more modern applications, who are often web based, they run all side by side in different virtual hosts on a single Apache, LiteSpeed or NGINX instance. And thus all use the same unix account such as the Apache user and group.

After some reading, testing, failing, retrying and setting up the local firewall, I’ve got a working PosteSQL server, sorry cluster. Depending on connecting through a Unix domain socket, the loopback interface or to the machines IP address, either peer, ident or md5 authentication is used. Enabling this server to be used for testing most real life scenarios.

The hard work of unforking

2022-03-09T17:47:06+00:00

There were two reasons to revive Wastebug: 1) being in need of a good¹ tool, 2) having used a good tool for many years, but having lost some of the code. So far I’ve augmented all the code and have a working version of Litterbug running on an internal server. I’ve ported over nearly 300 bugs, feature requests and tasks from a Libre Office Calc spreadsheet. Slowly I’m working out all the kinks, trying to avoid the temptation of working on full integration with our current ERP solution. And also avoiding the temptation of re-implementing previous features of which the code has been lost but are still in my head.

I’m nearing a point that I can start the process of unforking all the changes back into Wastebug 0.9.1 and release 0.9.2, the first public release in 18 years!

A good tool as in a tool that:
- tracks the things to do,
- supports multiple users,
- handles many cases for many projects,
- does not force micromanagement to your workflow,
- has a simple and quick to use (may have a steep learning curve) interface,
- is easily modified and extended.
↩

Welcome to GitHub Pages!

2022-03-03T19:23:06+00:00

I’ve been struggling for about a week, for what to do with the documentation for the Wastebug project. Should I just stick to a README.md and INSTALL.md? Go for a Wiki on GitHub? Setup a dedicated website? Or add a section to the ASK-Solutions website? I’ve decided upon GitHub Pages.

The decision boils down to:

GitHub is iffy about their wikis and search engines.
I generally dislike wiki’s.
Me wanting more experience with Jekyll.
I don’t regard Wastebug a project or product of ASK-Solutions as we’ve always been more of a user of the project.