European Bob's Hula Hoopla!

So, this will be the last ever update to this blog... shed a tear

No, I'm not going anyway, but I'm changing URLs. I'm moving from my ISP's domain to one I control: both will work for now, but the new one will be the one updated. This is basically because a week today I'm moving house, and will be changing ISP.

So if you're currently using my packages, you need to change the apt source line (more details on my new site) in order to continue to receive updates.

Again, new packages. I still found I was getting problems with the Indexer with the last lot, but Peter seems to have fixed it now :) I still suffered from stale locks though - so, if you have files like:

/tmp/lucene-1f90313e5849e5c2ab12d9f723836364-write.lock

(The number could be all sorts of things)

... you'll want to remove them. Stop Hula, rm /tmp/lucene* and be on your merry way.

Other bugs:

• I think my Sunbird doesn't state the Status on entries properly - anyway, this means I can't update entries that are already on the calendar :( Even setting the Status to (eg.) "Confirmed" still results in an error, which is what makes me think it is Sunibrd at fault;
• Adding tasks to the calendar doesn't seem to work just yet.

You should find that you're able to connect, add events and stuff like that, though. Please let me know if you have any trouble; it's likely that the packages still aren't quite right about getting things up and running for everyone.

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 :)

Expo this year was mildly suprising for a number of reasons; mostly, it was a lot busier than last year (maybe even busier than a couple of years ago). Nice to see old friends again, and also meet some new ones.

Hula attracted a fair amount of attention. I'm going to send a slightly longer write-up to the lists, because there was a lot of feedback that kept getting repeated by lots of people: not terribly large jobs in the most part, but specific use cases and features that seem pretty commonly needed.

Lots of people stopped by the booth, users I've seen on the lists or on IRC, lovely to see Michael Meeks even if it was a short visit. Other Novell employees visited; knowledge of Hula varied interestingly. Also, I was a little surprised by the number of people who didn't know what Hula is - since there isn't a "proper" release yet this shouldn't be surprising, but lots of people don't know it exists yet. 1.0 will probably bring a flood of users, I imagine. Debian's Phil Hands did a great job of redirecting people enquiring about mail/groupware options from their stand, and the general confusion about what was happening with Open Exchange at RedHat (and Novell mostly talking about Groupwise) both contributed to people coming to check out the "community alternative".

I shall be the first to praise whoever it was at Novell who decided that Hula would be better off being straight GPL. No longer the MPL/LGPL/GPL (with the MPL being noticably missing from files) triumvirate, it's plain and simple. Woo.

hula_0.1.0+svn379-2_i386.changes uploaded successfully to localhost
along with the files:
  hula_0.1.0+svn379-2.dsc
  hula_0.1.0+svn379.orig.tar.gz
  hula_0.1.0+svn379-2.diff.gz
  hula_0.1.0+svn379-2_i386.deb
  hula-mta_0.1.0+svn379-2_i386.deb
  libhula0_0.1.0+svn379-2_i386.deb
  libhula-dev_0.1.0+svn379-2_i386.deb

Greetings,

        Your Debian queue daemon

Since it's inception, this blog has been known as "European Bob's Hula Holler" - we like a bit of alliteration around here. However, Seb also came up with the name for his weekly news letter (and, he did ask if that was ok by me ;), so I shall change the name of this blog.

Henceforth, this shall be known as "European Bob's Hula Hoopla!". This title has been used before, but no blog is called this.

Seb is in London - if you're reading this Seb, chances of free WiFi in Heathrow are about as likely as Papal children. You can do it if you've setup nstx or a similar IP-over-DNS proxy, but I would guess that you haven't done that :o)

New plans for Hula are being wiki'd, and the main biggie is the Ukulele search system, an optional part of Hula being built on the same stuff Beagle is being built on - including mono. I suspect, like others, that this will cause some to turn away from Hula. My personal feeling is that mono is the direction the project should be taking, though - in particular, for simple development of custom agents and for writing custom tools. Maybe it will be less optional in Hula v2.

Tyler says that the Hula source jumped 100M in size on June 30^th, and that was why live ran out of disk space.

Apparently, it went from 110M to 230M?

Not here:

$ du -hs src/ include/
94M     src/
1.9M    include/

Given vast quantities (2/3rds) of src/ are actually HTML templates, etc., I wonder whether Tyler has access to some super-sekrit source ;o)