CRM Integration via LDAP

Our vision for NetCenter is to facilitate and drive a customer centric view of day to day activities within an organization. Whether you're in sales, engineering, administration, or elsewhere, we want to help organize your documents, emails, phone calls, projects, and other day to day activities in a customer centric way.

We also want a platform that's easy to use and integrates well into existing business systems.

As part of this effort, I recently completed exposing NetCenter contacts to mail clients like Zimbra, Outlook, and Thunderbird via a custom OpenLDAP backend.

All of these mail clients can leverage LDAP based address books, so we expose NetCenter contacts via LDAP so that you can quickly and easily send emails to prospective and current customers. Here's a screenshot from Outlook:


And Zimbra:


There's no real documentation on how to create a custom backend, but the back-null and back-shell backends are pretty good places to start.

Incoming call screen pops with sipX, rabbitMQ, and Adobe Air

I just finished the first beta of NetCenterPlus, an Adobe Air html based tray application that presents screen pops for incoming calls on sipX systems. NetCenterPlus is part of NetCenter, a CRM/Business Productivity solution from NetServe365.

Here's a screenshot of the notification window on an incoming call.

On the backend, I implemented a solution very similar to the one I did for Integrating sipx with ejabberd. There are two database triggers installed into the SIPXCDR database, the second of which is a PostgreSQL plperlu trigger which uses Net::Stomp to send a message to our rabbitMQ server indicating the callerId of an incoming call to the user registered for the destination extension. Not many of lines of code:

CREATE FUNCTION cse_ncplus_change() RETURNS trigger AS $end$
use Net::Stomp;

my ($domain, $uid, $pwd) = @{$_TD->{args}};
my $msg = TD->{"new"}{"from_id"};

my $stomp = Net::Stomp->new({hostname=>'mq.nvizn.com', port=>'61613'});
$stomp->connect({login=>$uid, passcode=>$pwd});

my $uid = $_TD->{"new"}{"username"};
$stomp->send({destination=>"/$domain/ncplus/$uid",
       body=>($msg)});

$stomp->disconnect;
return undef;
$end$
LANGUAGE plperlu;

The other plpgsql trigger looks up the destination extension and munges up a nice looking incoming call number. That exercise is left to the reader.

Now we've got a message on a per-user queue for every incoming call on our sipX system. So what next?

I wanted an easy to deploy, cross platform, tray application that would listen for incoming messages on present the screen pop. I looked at Mozilla Prism, Silverlight, and Adobe Air. Air was not my first choice to be honest, but the Prism project seems to have stagnated afaict, and Silverlight 2.0 on Linux doesn't look like it will be out anytime soon, so I went with Air. After spending some time with the product, I've definitely grown in my appreciation of its ease of use and design. It's really nice to be able to leverage existing web development skills to build these type of applications.

So what does the Air application do? First of it, I used air.Socket and javascript to implement a STOMP client.

First the connection code:

air.trace("setting up MessageQueue...");
  this.socket = new air.Socket();
  var self = this;

this.socket.addEventListener(air.Event.CONNECT, function(event) {
    self.sendCommand("CONNECT\nlogin:guest\npasscode:" + password + "\n\n");
    self.state = self.STATE.CONNECT;
  });

The main listener loop looks something like this:

this.socket.addEventListener(air.ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA,
                               function(event) {
                                                                              
    switch (self.state) {
    case self.STATE.CONNECT:
      self.subscribe();
      break;
    case self.STATE.READY:
      var data = event.target.readUTFBytes(event.target.bytesAvailable);
      var lines = data.split("\n");
      if (lines[0] == "MESSAGE" && lines.length>5) {
        msg_callback(lines[6]);
      }
      break;
    }
  });

So a NetCenterPlus user installs the application via a web page (yet to be prettied up!).



Then, the user enters their NetCenter username and password (again, this dialog needs some UI love. Did I mention I'm not a graphic artist?):



You can read and write to a local encrypted store in Air via functions like this:

readFromLocalStore = function(key, defstr) {                                
  var item = air.EncryptedLocalStore.getItem(key);                            
  if (item == null) return defstr;                                            
  return item.readUTFBytes(item.length);                                      
  }                                                                           
                                                                              
saveToLocalStore = function(key, value) {                                   
  var bytes = new air.ByteArray();                                            
  bytes.writeUTFBytes(value);                                                 
  air.EncryptedLocalStore.setItem(key, bytes);                                
  } 

When NetCenterPlus receives an incoming screen pop, we use the DOM to set the incoming call caller id, then we do an authenticated HTTP GET on the NetCenter REST based API to lookup the contact's name. The code looks something like this:

    var cpnum = this.document.getElementById("callpop_number");
    cpnum.innerHTML = fnum;

    var url = "http://" + server + "/api/contact/byPhone/" + callnum;
    var request = new air.URLRequest(url);

    var loader = new air.URLLoader();
    var self = this; var loader_sucess = true;
                                                                              
    loader.addEventListener(air.IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, function(error) {
        air.trace("Failed to load: " + url);
    });

    loader.addEventListener(air.Event.COMPLETE, function(event) {
 var data = new air.URLVariables(event.target.data);
        var cpname = self.document.getElementById("callpop_name");
 cpname.innerHTML = data.name;
    });

You setup the login credentials in Air, with a single line of code:

air.URLRequestDefaults.setLoginCredentialsForHost(this.server, username, password);

The NetCenter CRM is a Grails application that exposes a REST based api via basic authentication tied into Active Directory. To set this up, I added the following lines to grails-app/conf/Config.groovy:

jsecurity.filter.config = """                                                 
                                                                              
[filters]                                                                     
authcBasic = org.jsecurity.web.filter.authc.BasicHttpAuthenticationFilter     
authcBasic.applicationName = NetCenter API                                    
                                                                              
[urls]                                                                        
/api/** = authcBasic                                                          
"""

The contact controller "byPhone" method that the Air application uses is a very simple:

    def byPhone = {
      def contacts = Contact.withCriteria {
        eq('active', true)
        eq('licensee.id', session.lid)
        or {
          eq('workPhone', params.id)
          eq('homePhone', params.id)
          eq('cellPhone', params.id)
        }
      }                                                                       

      return [ 'contacts': contacts ]
    }

Well that about describes how all these parts come together. We plan on adding a lot more functionality to the NetCenterPlus Air application and thus far I'm pretty pleased with the Air platform.

NetCenter Click to Call

I just completed adding "Click to Call" functionality to NetCenter. Since this is a bit difficult to demonstrate with screenshots, I made a YouTube video instead.



I implemented "Click to Call" using Aloha and RabbitMQ, testing the solution on sipX.

I have a grails PlaceCallService that sets up a connection to our RabbitMQ instance like this:

  static transactional = false;
  ConnectionParameters connectionParameters;
  ConnectionFactory connectionFactory;
  ConfigObject config = ConfigurationHolder.config;

  MessageQueueService() {
    connectionParameters = new ConnectionParameters();
    connectionParameters.setUsername(config.mq.username);
    connectionParameters.setPassword(config.mq.password);
    connectionFactory = new ConnectionFactory(connectionParameters);
  }

The actual message publish function looks something like this:

  def publish(message) {
    try {
      Connection conn = connectionFactory.newConnection(config.mq.host,
                                                        AMQP.PROTOCOL.PORT);
      Channel ch = conn.createChannel();

      ch.queueDeclare(config.placeCall.routingKey);
      ch.basicPublish("", config.placeCall.routingKey, null,
                      message.getBytes());                                    

      ch.close();
      conn.close();
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
      log.error("Main thread caught exception: " + e);
      return false
    }

    return true
  }

Then in a "Third Party call initiator daemon", I unpack the message and use the Aloha stack to do a

        try {
            OutboundCallLegBean outboundCallLegBean = (OutboundCallLegBean)
                applicationContext.getBean("outboundCallLegBean");
            CallBean callBean = (CallBean)
                applicationContext.getBean("callBean");
            callBean.addCallListener(this);

            // create two call legs                                           
            String callLegId1 =
                outboundCallLegBean.createCallLeg(URI.create(callee),
                                                  URI.create(caller));
            String callLegId2 =
                outboundCallLegBean.createCallLeg(URI.create(caller),
                                                  URI.create(callee));

            // join the call legs                                             
            System.out.println(String.format("connecting %s and %s in call...$
            System.out.println(callBean.joinCallLegs(callLegId1, callLegId2))$
        }

This chunk of code is based on the helpful Third Party Call sample from Aloha's subversion repository.

Anyway, it's working well, consumes minimal resources on the web server (just post message to the "/placeCall/request" queue), and only took a few days to setup and deploy into production. Many thanks to the Aloha team, RabbitMQ folks, and sipX gurus.

NetCenter CRM

For the last month or so, I've been working on "NetCenter" a Grails 1.1 based CRM system that will integrate with sipX for call detail records, Zimbra or Exchange 2007 for email, calendaring, and time tracking purposes, and finally Alfresco or Sharepoint for document management.

I've really enjoyed using Grails - its a real productivity booster and I really appreciate the Separation of concerns you get with an MVC framework.

I completed the sipX integration first and am now working with Exchange 2007 Web Services so that users can associate meetings with accounts and mark them billable/non-billable.

First a few screenshots, then a brief overview of the sipx integration. Note: in the screenshots below the account and contact information is randomly generated test data, while the call records are real records coming out of our production sipX server.

Call Manager:


Account Calls:


Contact Calls:


I used the Grails Quartz Plugin and added a grails-app/jobs/CdrSyncJob.groovy that looks at licensees with registered sipX servers and then queries with sipX instance for call detail records that have not yet been processed.

I wanted call detail report generation to be as fast as possible, so the CdrSyncJob looks up the sipX callee and caller phone numbers against the contact table and licencedUser table then writes a new "call" record into the NetCenter database and marks the sipX call record has having been processed so it can be ignored the next time the job runs. Now whenever anyone wants to view all calls made to any contact within a certain account, its a simple database query that has a few joins and doesn't involve any phone number normalization, determining whether a call is related to any known contact, ignoring interoffice calls, or figuring out the call direction.

Here a few snippets for CdrSyncJob. First the execute() method:

def execute() {

  if (Environment.current == Environment.DEVELOPMENT) return
  def licensees = Licensee.withCriteria {
    eq("active", true)
    isNotNull("sipHost")
  }

  licensees.each { syncCdrs(it); }
}

Then syncCdrs begins with some Groovy SQL like this:

   def cdr = Sql.newInstance("jdbc:postgresql://${licensee.sipHost}/SIPXCDR", "username", "password", "org.postgresql.Driver")
                                                   cdr.eachRow("select * from view_call_records A, cdrs_sync B where A.id=B.id and NOT(B.done)")

Hmmm, I guess I should point out that view_call_records and cdrs_sync are custom tables. Here's the SQL:

CREATE VIEW view_call_records as
  select id, SUBSTRING(caller_aor FROM '.*.*') as caller,
 LTRIM(LTRIM(SUBSTRING(callee_aor FROM '.*.*'), '8'), '1') as callee,
  connect_time as start_time,
 to_char(cdrs.end_time-cdrs.connect_time, 'MI') AS minutes, 
 to_char(cdrs.end_time-cdrs.connect_time, 'SS') as seconds
  from cdrs where cdrs.termination != 'F' and cdrs.connect_time IS NOT NULL;

CREATE TABLE cdrs_sync (
    id integer PRIMARY KEY,
    done boolean DEFAULT FALSE
);

Anyway, the rest of syncCdrs is just about ignoring interoffice calls or calls to contacts with don't have on record, then adding new entries to the NetCenter call table:

new Call(callDirection: direction, callId: it.id, contact: contact, dateStarted: it.start_time, minutes: it.minutes, seconds: it.seconds, licensee: licensee, owner: owner).save();

and marking the call as processed in the cdrs_sync table.

Next time I get a chance to blog, I hope to show the Exchange integration and some jQuery snippets. jQuery has been a big productivity booster as well. Web development has come along way!

Integrating sipX with ejabberd

I recently completed integrating our sipX based voip platform with our ejabberd XMPP server, so that users can see when others are on the phone or not. There are alot of similar integrations that people have done with Asterisk using their AMI api, but I haven't found anything similar for sipX yet, so we rolled our own for now. While, it's not terribly exciting, here's a screenshot of what it looks like when someone is on the phone:


The solution I came up with involves 3 parts. First, I setup a clustered RabbitMQ server (an open source implementation of AMQP). I plan on using it to facilitate a loosely coupled, event driven architecture for integrating multiple open source
applications. I'm pretty happy with RabbitMQ thus far - about the only complaint I have is that they don't have any message tracing capabilities right now (version 1.5.0) which made it more difficult to debug my client side code. I'm also hoping that sometime soon we start seeing debian packages for python/perl amqp libraries. For now, I'm using Net::Stomp and the RabbitMQ stomp adapter which seemed like the most stable, easily deployed client side solution.

On the XMPP server side, I created an erlang module that acts as a message consumer. Each virtual host in our ejabberd server listens on a separate queue for presence messages generated by the sipX side and sends out XMPP presence updates to online sessions.

After getting the RabbitMQ erlang client library installed, here's the code I used to connect and setup my consumer:

Connection = amqp_connection:start(Uname, Pwd, "mq.nvizn.com"),
Channel = amqp_connection:open_channel(Connection),                                
Qname = list_to_binary("/" ++ Host ++ "/presence/phone"),
Q = lib_amqp:declare_queue(Channel, Qname),
lib_amqp:bind_queue(Channel, <<"">>, Q, Qname),
lib_amqp:subscribe(Channel, Q, self(), false),

Then I created a handle_info function that looks like this:

handle_info({ {'basic.deliver', DeliveryTag, _, _, _, _ },
              {content, ClassId, Properties, PropertiesBin,
              [Payload]} = Info}, State) ->

%% Message processing here, then send out the XMPP presence update...,
BroadcastPresence = fun({U, S, R}) ->
    Dest = jlib:make_jid(U, S, R),
    ejabberd_router:route(FromJID, Dest, Presence)
  end,                                                                             
Sessions = ejabberd_sm:get_vh_session_list(State#state.host),
lists:foreach(BroadcastPresence, Sessions),

Now on the sipX side, things are a bit more ugly, and when I have more time later, I'd like to rework this end. For now, I created a PL/pgSQL AFTER trigger on SIPXCDR.call_state_events table that handles new call state events ('S' and 'E' event_types to be specific). This trigger inserts new rows into a new cse_summary table I created for every call, one for when the call is setup and one for call termination and it does this for each internal user. If the call involves two internal folks, you end up with 4 rows, if on the other hand, one side is external, you end up with only 2 rows. This trigger also looks up the XMPP jid for the extension and records that in the generated cse_summary rows.

When a row is created in the cse_summary table, a separate
PL/Perl AFTER trigger uses Net::Stomp to generate a call state
event message for the RabbitMQ cluster.

Here's what the PL/Perl trigger looks like:

my $stomp = Net::Stomp->new({hostname=>'mq.nvizn.com',port=>'61613'});
$stomp->connect({login=>$uid, passcode=>$pwd});

my $msg = sprintf("%s,%s,%s", $domain,                                             
$_TD->{"new"}{"event_type"}, $_TD->{"new"}{"jid"});

$stomp->send({destination=>"/$domain/presence/phone", body=>($msg)});
$stomp->disconnect;

Now, I'm just creating some debian packages and RPMs (for the sipX side), documenting how it works, and thinking about our next integration.

Load Balance Clustered Ejabberd Servers

I recently completed setting up our XMPP infrastructure. After spending some time reviewing the current capabilities of jabberd2, openfire, djabberd, and ejabberd, I decided that ejabberd had the best combination of features for our needs: virtual hosting, LDAP integration, clustering support, shared rosters, and reasonably good documentation!

So after setting up the first ejabberd node (im1), with a test virtual host and working LDAP integration, I setup our second ejabberd node (im2) by copying /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg to the 2nd node, then running through the following steps:

First launch an erlang shell as the ejabberd user, with erl -sname ejabberd@im2 -mnesia extra_db_nodes "['ejabberd@im1']" -s mnesia

Then, to replicate all ejabberd tables in my configuration, I ran a: mnesia:change_table_copy_type(schema, node(), disc_copies).mnesia:add_table_copy(offline_msg,node(),disc_only_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(privacy,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(sr_group,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(sr_user,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(roster,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(last_activity,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(disco_publish,node(),disc_only_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(pubsub_node,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(pubsub_state,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(pubsub_item,node(),disc_only_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(session,node(),ram_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(s2s,node(),ram_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(route,node(),ram_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(iq_response,node(),ram_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(caps_features,node(),ram_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(motd_users,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(motd,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(acl,node(),disc_copies). mnesia:add_table_copy(config,node(),disc_copies).

After you quit the shell, you'll most likely need to move the result mnesia database files to the ejabberd user's $HOME folder.

Once, both nodes were working correctly I setup a LVS-DR load balancer with ldirectord. This proves to be rather straightforward.

First the realservers (each ejabberd instance, im1 and im2) had to configured with a local interface that listens to the load balancer's VIP (virtual IP). The most reliable way I found to set this up was with a simple

ip addr add 172.16.254.60/32 brd + dev lo label lo:vip

in /etc/rc.local.

Then I setup a /etc/sysctl.d/60-ipvs-arp-rules.conf with

net.ipv4.conf.eth0.arp_ignore = 1
net.ipv4.conf.eth0.arp_announce = 2
net.ipv4.conf.all.arp_ignore = 1
net.ipv4.conf.all.arp_announce = 2

On Ubuntu (and I think debian as well), you must also tweak /etc/sysctl.d/10-network-security.conf to disable source address validation

net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter=0
net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter=0

That's pretty much it for the realservers.

Setting up the loadbalancer involves setting up the VIP in /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0:vip0
iface eth0:vip0 inet static
  address 172.16.254.60
  broadcast 172.16.254.60
  netmask 255.255.255.255

Then setting up ldirectord (apt-get install ldirectord) in /etc/ldirectord.cf with

/etc/ldirectord.cf
# Global Directives
checktimeout=3
checkinterval=15
autoreload=yes
logfile="/var/log/ldirectord.log"
logfile="local0"
emailalert="joel.reed@nvizn.com"
emailalertfreq=3600
emailalertstatus=all
quiescent=yes

virtual=172.16.254.60:5222
    real=172.16.254.70:5222 gate
    real=172.16.254.72:5222 gate
    scheduler=wlc
    protocol=tcp
    checktype=negotiate
    service=simpletcp
    request="junk"
    receive="jabber.org"

It'd be really cool if there was some kind of builtin heathcheck call you could do on an ejabberd node, but alas there isn't so I just send it a string of garbage ("junk" to be exact), and look for the jabber.org string in the XMPP response. Seems to be working OK thus far...

Alfresco on EC2

Over the weekend, I created a Alfresco Labs 3b AMI on EC2, Amazon's cloud computing platform.

I took one of the Alestic Ubuntu 8.10 base images, added my own ec2-tools_0.1.deb package, and built out an AMI with Labs 3b running on the system tomcat5.5, instead of the bundled tomcat instance. That part was far more brutal than using EC2. You have to make quiet a few changes to the catalina policy to get things working.

I made an Alfresco package, that installs an /etc/tomcat5.5/policy.d/60alfresco.policy file that looks like this:

grant { 
    permission java.lang.RuntimePermission "accessClassInPackage.org.apache.*";

    permission java.lang.RuntimePermission "accessDeclaredMembers";    
    permission java.lang.reflect.ReflectPermission "suppressAccessChecks";
    permission java.util.PropertyPermission "alfresco.jmx.dir", "read,write";
    permission java.util.PropertyPermission "webapp.root", "read,write";
    permission java.io.FilePermission "/usr/share/java/servlet-api-2.4.jar", "read";
};

grant codeBase "file:${catalina.home}/bin/tomcat-juli.jar" {
    permission java.io.FilePermission "/usr/share/tomcat5.5/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/logging.properties", "read";
    permission java.io.FilePermission "/var/lib/tomcat5.5/temp/-", "read,write,delete,execute";
    permission java.io.FilePermission "/var/lib/tomcat5.5/temp", "read,write,execute";
}

All of my AMIs have a rebundle.sh script that can quickly upload an updated AMI. It looks something like this:

#!/bin/sh
ACCOUNTID=xxxxxx
CERTFILE=/etc/ec2/xxxxxxx.pem
KEYFILE=/etc/ec2/xxxxxxx.pem
ACCESSKEY=xxxxxxxxxxx
SECRETKEY=xxxxxxxxxx

umount /var/local
ec2-bundle-vol -u $ACCOUNTID -c $CERTFILE -k $KEYFILE -p ubuntu-8.10-appsuite-1.0-20081101 --ec2cert /etc/ec2/amitools/cert-ec2.pem -r i386 
ec2-upload-bundle -b nvizn.com -m /tmp/ubuntu-8.10-appsuite-1.0-20081101.manifest.xml -a $ACCESSKEY -s $SECRETKEY
ec2-register nvizn.com/ubuntu-8.10-appsuite-1.0-20081101.manifest.xml

This made life a bit easier as I made changes to the image and uploaded them. I unmount /var/local at the start of the script as that's where I mount my EBS volume.

Samba4 on Ubuntu Intrepid

Here's a brief rundown of my experiences with Samba4 on Ubuntu Intrepid.

I first tried the samba4 package in the ubuntu intrepid repositories, but when you do a

./setup/provision --realm=azulogic.com --domain=azulogic --adminpass=fubar --server-role='domain controller'

you get a python stackdump with

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/etc/samba/smb.conf'

I tried creating a "/usr/etc/samba" folder (though the distaste was high), but then proceeded to get further file path errors.

So, next I switched to the Debian Experimental package. This worked much better.

After you apt-get install the package, you'll have to fixup /etc/init.d/samba4 - it's still looking for smbd (the samba3 daemon), whereas in samba4 its now /usr/sbin/samba.

So, I just did a

ln -s /usr/sbin/samba /usr/sbin/smbd

to get it to work.

After getting krb5, dns, and samba ready to go, I tried to join a linux machine running winbind 2:3.2.3-1ubuntu3 to the domain. No luck though:

(~) net ads join -U Administrator
Enter Administrator's password:
Failed to join domain: failed to lookup DC info for domain 'AZULOGIC.COM' over rpc: NT_STATUS_INTERNAL_ERROR

How do you fix this? One way is to run in the "single" process model mode. I changed /etc/init.d/samba4 to launch the samba daemon with -M single. Then you see a nice:

(~) net ads join -U Administrator
Enter Administrator's password:
Using short domain name -- AZULOGIC
Joined 'LTS' to realm 'azulogic.com

One final note: as far as I can tell the debian version (4.0.0alpha6-GIT-7fb9007) crashes when someone tries to do a change password. So beware!

Secure Apt Repository Howto

After a good bit of googling and poking around, I completed the setup of our secure apt repository here at nvizn.

Here's how you'd do it for an Ubuntu intrepid repository.

First, setup a directory tree that looks like this:

mkdir -p /var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/
mkdir -p /var/www/packages/intrepid/main

Then, install apt-ftparchive, which will do most of the heavy lifting.

apt-get install apt-ftparchive

Now, drop all your .debs into /var/www/packages/intrepid/main/ and create an apt-ftparchive configuration file at /etc/archive.config

Here's what mine looks like:

Dir {
  ArchiveDir "/var/www/packages";
  CacheDir "/home/joel.reed/uploads/";
};

Default {
  Packages::Compress ". gzip bzip2";
  Sources::Compress ". gzip bzip2";
  Contents::Compress ". gzip bzip2";
};

APT::FTPArchive::Release::Codename "intrepid";
APT::FTPArchive::Release::Suite "intrepid";
APT::FTPArchive::Release::Origin "Joel W. Reed";

TreeDefault {
  BinCacheDB "packages-$(SECTION)-$(ARCH).db";
  Directory "intrepid/$(SECTION)";
  Packages "$(DIST)/$(SECTION)/binary-$(ARCH)/Packages";
  SrcDirectory "intrepid/$(SECTION)";
  Sources "$(DIST)/$(SECTION)/source/Sources";
  Contents "$(DIST)/Contents-$(ARCH)";
};

Tree "dists/intrepid" {
   Sections "main";
   Architectures "i386";
}

Finally, run this sequence of commands:

apt-ftparchive generate /etc/archive.config
cd /var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/
apt-ftparchive -c /etc/archive.config release . > Release
rm -v Release.gpg
gpg -v --output Release.gpg -ba Release

When you're done, you'll end up with a /var/www/packages tree that looks something like this:

/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/main
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/Packages.bz2
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/main/binary-i386/Packages
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/Contents-i386
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/Release
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/Release.gpg
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/Contents-i386.gz
/var/www/packages/dists/intrepid/Contents-i386.bz2
/var/www/packages/intrepid
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main/alfresco-r3184-0.3.1.deb
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main/nvizn-base-0.3.6.deb
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main/libnss-cache_0.1-1_i386.deb
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main/nsscache_0.8.4.1_all.deb
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main/stratus-desktop-0.2.deb
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main/packages-main-i386.db
/var/www/packages/intrepid/main/jsetup_0.5.1_all.deb

Now, to make all this work, you need to have a gpg key of course, and apache set to serve up /var/www/packages, and all client machines need the public key. To do that with a key on a keyserver, do something like

gpg --recv-keys B1850655 && gpg --export B1850655 | apt-key add -

Hope this is helpful to you!

Startup

I haven't blogged for while, because I've been putting a lot of hours into an open source startup company. It's been great fun to work with some new technologies like Groovy, Grails, CouchDB, and Samba4.

Among other things, I setup an openldap server, built a few custom www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200807/msg00002.html">overlays, and integrated Zimbra, Alfresco, Openfire, SipX, Samba3, and an Ubuntu desktop. Each of these integrations has there pros and cons, perhaps Zimbra and SipX are the nicest.

I'm hoping to blog about my experience with Samba4 shortly.

OpenTF 0.6.0 Release

Wow - two months without a blog post and 3 months since my last OpenTF release! For the last month or two, I really haven't worked much on OpenTF, preferring instead to work on learning NT Greek and more about the Book of Isaiah.

The latest release includes a few new goodies and many bugfixes. There's the new IRC changeset notification bot, support for CruiseControl (an open source continuous build framework), a monodevelop plugin for browsing TFS servers, and several new commands like "shelve", "rollback", and "merges".

Over the next few month, I hope to be able to further develop the monodevelop plugin, continue work on missing commands, and begin testing other open source Team Foundation tools for compatibility with the OpenTF libraries.

Job Openings

If there's anyone looking for a ASP.Net developer position in the Pittsburgh (PA) area and you've contributed to the mono project in the past, please put a link to your resume in the comments for this post. We're a great company to work and are early adopters of .Net related technologies. I'd love to be able to hire folks who have helped out the mono project. Thanks!

MonoDevelop and Team Foundation

Now that MonoDevelop is nearing a 1.0 release, I thought I'd take another look at fleshing out a TeamFoundation plugin for MD.

For starters, I'm taking the "tf explore" command in OpenTF, factoring out the Gtk classes into a separate assembly, then building out an MD addin that makes use of it.

Obligatory screenshot:

It will take a while to clean up this code and the build machinery, and to figure out how to make better use of builtin MonoDevelop addin services, but perhaps in a release of two, we'll have something useful. If you're interested in helping, please do!

At some point, I'm also hopeful that those developing the VersionControl API for MD can consider the needs of a Team Foundation plugin. I'd be very interested in seeing if we can make something work for SVN, GIT, etc. and TFS. That'd be a much better situation.

OpenTF Build Changes

I started the OpenTF project out by copying the Mono Olive tree, and replacing its assemblies and tools with my Team Foundation files. This worked well on *nix, but recently I've been trying to improve support for building on Windows as well.

Should I use cscript, nmake, powershell, BAT, project files, or some combination of these? How could I implement a build solution that didn't just duplicate the same build instructions (source files, references, etc) in 2 different formats: one for windows and one for *nix?

I decided to keep things simple on Windows - just use a VS2005 solution with a bunch of project files. Then for *nix, I decided to make libxslt's xsltproc a build requirement, and generate the list of sources and references for the mono olive make machinery using a few simple XSL stylesheets.

For example, all the .sources files are now generated via build/sources.xsl. Which looks something like this:

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="Project/ItemGroup/Compile"/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="Compile">
    <xsl:value-of select="@Include" /><xsl:text> </xsl:text>
  </xsl:template>

I also have .references files for each assembly, also generated via an XSL file from the .csproj.

Now, I just maintain the VS2005 project files, and leave the *nix build stuff to the stylesheets. I added support for conditional sources using the Conditional attribute. Its working quite well thus far.

Using git-svn with Mono

Why use git to hack on mono?

I've found myself far more productive and make heavy use of feature branches and squashed commits for my day job, so when I hack on mono, I really enjoy being able to leverage the same capabilities.

By "squashed commits", I guess I should really say, leveraging the power of a distributed version control system that lets me break down a task into many smaller steps, commit each step individually, then squashing the whole thing down to one patch that I can post to mono-devel for review.

So do you set things up to use git with Mono?

cd /usr/local/src/
mkdir mono && cd mono
mkdir mcs && cd mcs
git-svn init svn+ssh://username@mono-cvs.ximian.com/source/trunk/mcs
git-svn fetch -r 86200 && git-svn fetch
cd ..
mkdir mono && cd mono
git-svn init svn+ssh://username@mono-cvs.ximian.com/source/trunk/mono
git-svn fetch -r 86200 && git-svn fetch

Note: the above recipe copies the svn history only back to revision 86200. You can pick any valid svn revision number you like, or if you want the full revision history see this page on the Mono wiki.

Ok. Everything's setup. Now what?

First, let's say I want to hack on some ASP.NET ashx page bug. I'll setup a local branch "ashx" to store whatever code I write/change:

git-checkout -b ashx

Now I have two branches: "master" which was setup by git-svn above, and "ashx" which I just created and switched over to. Now, I can:

emacs -nw class/System.Web/...
git-commit -a -m "1st step"
emacs -nw class/System.Web/...
git-commit -a -m "2nd step"
emacs -nw class/System.Web/...
git-commit -a -m "3rd step"

Ok, now to post a message to mono-devel:

git-diff master ashx > ~/Bug6884.fix
mutt

When everything looks good and no one has any complaints, I can finally commit back to mono's svn repository with:

git-branch master
git-pull --squash --summary . ashx
git-commit -a -m "message for mono's svn"
git-svn dcommit

This "squashes" my commits down into one batch of changes on the master branch, which I then commit and push to svn repo.

Finally, How do I update my local tree?

git-svn fetch && git-svn rebase remotes/git-svn

Note: This will update the current branch you are on locally.

Hope someone finds this helpful!