Fixing Australian time zones in plone

 News, People, plone, software, System Updates, tech, tmc, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Mar 132011
 

One of our clients, the Ancient Arts Fellowship have requested a new Plone site.

After some deliberation and several futile attempts to upgrade their current Plone 2.5.5 to a plone 3.x instance we made a collective decision to run with a new Plone 4 setup.

Of course the “curse of the time zone” reared its ugly head and bit us on the bum.

the “Curse of the Time Zone” arises when (for reasons historic and political) there is a collsion between the GNU/Linux timezone names and those expected by zope/Plone framework. This happend because the GNU/Linux servers call Australian and US time zones “EST” and “EDT”… while zope/plone stack calles them AEDT, AEST for Australia and  EDT and EST for USA.

Ultimately the solution is to set a timezone variable inside of the Zope framework to take care of the differences, but that problem is what to call it…  Australia/Canberra and Australia/Sydney did not work . But after a few searches and trial and error we found this magic string  “AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3″ it seems to work.

so the process is:

  • build your zope/plone stack.
  • go to base.cf in $TARGET/zinstance
  • add the follwing lines to [instance] section:
      environment-vars =
          TZ AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0/3

 

 Posted by tmc at 23:59

Upgrading postgresql databse server software on Debian Squeeze

 News, People, System Updates, tmc, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Mar 062011
 

I am very happy to report, that just as just as was described in the PostgreSQL update post the same process works flawlessly for migrating postgresql  8.3.x to 8.4.x on Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0)

 Posted by tmc at 23:23

Hosting Joint Venture Launched

 Dale Baldwin, News, tmc, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Nov 252010
 

Vandrad Research Labs are proud to announce that together with Mr Dale Baldwin of dalebaldwin.com we have launched a new web services and hosting joint venture to support Dale and his growing web design and consultancy business based out of Hobart in Tasmania.

Recently Mr Baldwin has advised that this arrangement has allowed him to close two deals in a very short period of time. Excellent work Dale, and we look forward to having our inaugural customers on board very shortly.

 Posted by tmc at 06:59

Blog Engine Upgrage no 2

 News, System Updates, tmc, Vandrad News  No Responses »
Jun 262010
 

Yesterday I reconfigured all the instances of WordPress to talk separate wordpress instances. Each container can be upgraded and themed independently of any other.

Each container can also serve the same content to multiple domain names.

This now has been tested and an in-place upgrade to WordPress 3.0 is working very nicely.

 Posted by tmc at 09:27

Upgrading postgresql databse server software on Debian Lenny (Old Post)

 People, tmc  1 Response »
Jan 012010
 

This is a systems administration and database technology oriented one:

Problem: Because we have several servers that was upgrade from Debian Etch and the to Debian Lenny via the “apt-get dist-upgrade” path , I need to upgrade older instance postgresql 8.1 to postgresql 8.3 as smoothly as possible.

The databases are fairly simple but I really don’t want to muck around with dump and restore procedures, if there is a better way to do it. I turns out there is a better way:

Solution:

First: backup your data using the pg_dump utility. This way you will have a fall-back and all of your data in case something does go wrong.

Second: install new postgresql packages: apt-get install postgresql-8.3 postgresql-client-8.3 . Now you have two database clusters in parallel.

Third: what we need to is migrate all the data from the old one to the new one. You will need to do this with sudo or root priviledges. To go ahead do the do the following:

1. Invoke pg_dropcluster –stop 8.3 main. This will stop the new postgresql cluster (but not the server) and make it dormant and ready for migration.

2. Invoke pg_upgradecluster 8.1 main to kick off the upgrade process. This may take some time. My output was something like this:

Creating new cluster (configuration: /etc/postgresql/8.3/main, data: /var/lib/postgresql/8.3/main)…
Moving configuration file /var/lib/postgresql/8.3/main/postgresql.conf to /etc/postgresql/8.3/main…
Moving configuration file /var/lib/postgresql/8.3/main/pg_hba.conf to /etc/postgresql/8.3/main…
Moving configuration file /var/lib/postgresql/8.3/main/pg_ident.conf to /etc/postgresql/8.3/main…
Configuring postgresql.conf to use port 5433…
Disabling connections to the old cluster during upgrade…
Disabling connections to the new cluster during upgrade…
Re-enabling connections to the old cluster…
Re-enabling connections to the new cluster…
Creating globals…
Fixing hardcoded library paths for stored procedures…
Upgrading database postfix…
Analyzing database postfix…
Fixing hardcoded library paths for stored procedures…
Upgrading database postgres…
Analyzing database postgres…
Fixing hardcoded library paths for stored procedures…
Upgrading database template1…
pg_restore: [archiver (db)] Error while PROCESSING TOC:
pg_restore: [archiver (db)] Error from TOC entry 1502; 1262 1 DATABASE template1 postgres
pg_restore: [archiver (db)] could not execute query: ERROR:  database “template1″ already exists
Command was:
CREATE DATABASE template1 WITH TEMPLATE = template0 ENCODING = ‘SQL_ASCII’;
WARNING: errors ignored on restore: 1
Analyzing database template1…
Copying old configuration files…
Copying old start.conf…
Stopping target cluster…
Stopping old cluster…
Disabling automatic startup of old cluster…
Configuring old cluster to use a different port (5433)…
Starting target cluster on the original port…
Success. Please check that the upgraded cluster works. If it does,
you can remove the old cluster with

pg_dropcluster 8.1 main

3. Verify everytting and then when you’re happy that all data is as it should be, invoke: pg_dropcluster 8.1 main This command will remove old version of the database cluster, and clean up the postgresql instances

4. Now that all is working well you can clean up your server with : apt-get –purge remove postgresql-8.1 postgresql-client-8.1

This process was relatively painless and quick. Definitely a our preferred way to do this sort of work, once you have a good known backup of your data.

 Posted by tmc at 11:55  Tagged with: , , ,

what is a “business architecture” ?

 People, tmc  No Responses »
Nov 302009
 

There is a perception amongst many people I speak to that Business Architecture is something for the big business, that it is expensive to do, that only medium and big businesses can get value from it.

The reality is that behind the “Business Architecture” label lies a system used to describe, both in pictures and words:

  • what a business does to generate value for its customers
  • an understanding of and what “raw materials” (be that goods or information) are used, how the raw materials are transformed, and how the product or the service is sold.
  • a map of how information flows into, within, and out of the business.
  • a map of business processes used

So when you look at it this way, you really start to wonder how anyone who invests time and money into a business ( be it one of their own or someone else’s ) can say “oh no, this is not for us! that stuff is for the big guys who can afford it”.

How can you “not afford” to understand in detail what it is you are putting your time and money into…

Sometime in the near future I will post some real information about our experience with trying to describe our own business architecture, and about how we applied the knowledge we gained from that excercise to a good use.

 Posted by tmc at 21:59  Tagged with: , , ,
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