European Bob's Hula Hoopla!

I just uploaded my r641 packages. These will automatically upgrade your schema when you install it, and if you install the new .NET agents it will use mdbtool to automatically add the Agents to your tree. It pretty much now mostly works for me; Sunbird is behaving with it fairly well. But, there are some gotchas. Here's what I learned:

• If you just installed hula-cil-agents and hula wasn't restarted, restart it - it needs to start up the new agents
• Debian stable doesn't have a mono. This isn't great, because we need it. So, I found this apt line:

  deb http://people.debian.org/~formorer/mono backports main

  ... which is a semi-official backport, I guess. This allows you to run the new hotness on sarge.
• There are very many bugs in the new code. The main one I ran into was with the indexer, and deleting:

  /var/lib/hula/netmail/index/<username>/

  ... fixed it up for me.
• the best way to debug these is to use tcpflow or a similar tool to capture the network traffic - oftentimes the error is in there. A typical invocation for the caldav stuff might be:

  tcpflow -i lo port 8081

  I tend to run it in it's own directory, since it generates a fair few files and I don't want them overrunning and breeding. The usual error to look for in these files is some kind of mono back trace in a HTML comment.
• there are/were odd problems with the actual version of mono in use. I think I got rid of it, but if your new mono agents don't start, that's probably the problem. Try invoking one manually:

  mono /usr/lib/hula/HulaWeb.exe

  If it falls over in a heap, it's a mono version problem, most likely.

So, all the new cool calendar stuff we've been drooling about waiting for has landed in SVN. It's all written for mono, and hence isn't going to run on some systems, but I've packaged it up.

If you're on Debian testing/unstable, or Ubuntu breezy (maybe hoary too), you'll find that you can apt-get install hula-cil-agents to grab the new stuff. However, it won't work automatically. This is because there is no schema update yet - version 6 of the schema will come soon, but not yet ;o)

So, how to try it out? Take a copy of /var/lib/hula, maybe move it somewhere safe. Re-run hulasetup (you might need to mkdir /var/lib/hula; chown mail:mail /var/lib/hula ), and you'll find on startup your Hula Web Administrator has some new agents:

• Calendar Text Command Agent - this is the basis of the SMS/email interface
• Calendar Agent Web Services Agent - the new DAV server
• Indexer Agent - the search engine of Hula

None of these are configurable, except for the DAV server (you can turn it on and off ;), so don't worry about that. But, if you have them, you should find that ps aux shows a couple of new processes, both of which are run by mono. (Portions struck out above are corrected from my original entry; couple of mistakes there :)

Congrats, you're up and running!

Well, kinda. I downloaded a Mozilla Sunbird nightly - this has CalDAV support built in (unlike the 0.2 release). You should be able to add a new calendar of the CalDAV type, and it should kinda work.

Except, it doesn't, for me. First, I'm not totally sure what I should enter for the account! I currently have set http://<server>:8081/dav/<username>/calendar/Personal, but this might not be right. I'm also getting an error message from the DAV server:

** (/usr/lib/hula/HulaWeb.exe:17188): WARNING **: Missing method get_CipherStrength in assembly /usr/lib/hula/Mono.WebServer.dll, type Mono.Security.Protocol.Tls.SslStreamBase
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
in <0x00000> 
in <0x00023> Mono.WebServer.XSPWorker:Run (System.Object state)

I have no doubt that this probably means these packages currently don't run for anyone properly, although it might be related to the version of mono installed, or the mono libraries required.

If you have tried these and got them working, please let me know! Drop by on #hula on irc.freenode.net :)