Sam Harmon's blog: Open Source Tools Archives

December 11, 2006

Wildfire IM public beta

In my last post I mentioned that we're looking for users to try out our test deployment of the Wildfire IM server. Well, now I'm going to make the details public.

You can point your Jabber client to messenger.case.edu, port 5222 ~~(yeah, it's a nonstandard XMPP port... When this goes to production, it'll be the normal 5222)~~. If you don't have a Jabbber client, you can try Jive's open-source Spark. If for some reason your client can't do TLS, you can do the "old style" SSL encryption on port 5223.

Server-to-Server XMPP is enabled, so you should be able to IM Google Talk and other Jabber users. We've also got the IM gateway plugin enabled, which will allow you to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and IRC to some extent from your Jabber client.

update: All the connection details in this post are now correct, since the port move happened on Wednesday.

Posted by sdh7 at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

Darwin Calendar Server - Success

So, I managed to get the Darwin Calendar Server up and running.

It's still pretty primitive, but once I got Python 2.4 installed, and followed the QuickStart instructions (once they were posted), I was in business. I had a CalDAV server listening on port 8008 of my laptop. I could connect to it in with my web browser, authenticate as admin, and see .ics files in the directory, but that's the extent of the web access at present. In theory, OSAF's Scooby could potentially be connected to it to provide a Web Calendar, until either one is provided or Leopard Server is used.

I then went looking for clients to connect to it. iCal won't support CalDAV until Leopard comes out, so I went looking for other alternatives. I first tried OSAF's Chandler, but that didn't work so well. I couldn't get the OS X version to run for more than 30 seconds(it was version 0.7a3), let alone connect to the server. I then grabbed Mozilla Sunbird and gave it a try. It's working reasonably well.

There aren't any instructions on tying it into LDAP yet - it's right now only using a single hard-coded "admin" account, so the ability to schedule events with other users is unclear at present. Sunbird greyed out the "invite other users" button, but that may just be normal for all I know.

Posted by sdh7 at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 07, 2006

Darwin Calendar Server(!)

It looks like Apple is open-sourcing the Calendar Server that's going to be in OS X Server 10.5. It implements CalDAV, so you should be able to get to it using a client other than iCal.

I'm grabbing it via Subversion as I type this...turns out a lot of it is written in Python. Interesting...

Posted by sdh7 at 11:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Bedework Calendar

I first looked at Bedework a few months ago, and it seemed pretty primitive to me - just a fancy event calendar. I just looked at it again and it looks like they've made a lot of progress, adding personal calendars with CalDAV access, RSS feeds and other features. It's not quite in a position where we would want to adopt it, I think, since I can't figure out any way to invite people to my meetings, and setting up authentication outside of the built-in database consists of "configure Tomcat to talk to LDAP or CAS".

It also seems a little slow to me, but I am just running the quickstart version with embedded HSQLDB, and it's dumping tons of debugging output on the console, so those two factors may have something to do with that.

Posted by sdh7 at 03:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 03, 2006

GVC.Sitemaker

GVC.Sitemaker, the open-source version of the University of Michigan's UM.Sitemaker.

It's not quite a wiki farm, but it is pretty interesting looking.

Posted by sdh7 at 01:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 01, 2006

OpenDS

Looks like Sun has released some code towards an open-source Directory Server. It's still very early, and is missing important stuff, like access controls (that would allow for things like FERPA non-directory listings and the like), but definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Posted by sdh7 at 05:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 03, 2006

Open Source Tools: Fedora Directory Server

This week's tool is the Fedora Directory Server, which just released version 1.0.2 yesterday. This is an open-source LDAP server that is remarkably similar to the Sun Java Enterprise Directory Server (or JES DS) that we use here at Case. This is due to the fact that both products have a shared history that you can read about here.

There are a few differences due to the shared code base drifting apart for the last four and a half years, as JES DS can now run as 64-bit and allows having over 4GB of cache, which doesn't work terribly well on 32-bit platforms. Fedora DS has converted their Administration Server from running on the iPlanet web server to Apache.

While we're not really using this here at the moment, I have sort of borrowed the "startconsole" script from Fedora Directory Server in order to get the JES Directory Server console to run on a Mac (the console application is Java, but startconsole on JES is a platform-dependent executable. Go figure...)

In theory, this could be integrated here, as replication between the two servers is supposedly possible by convincing JES that the Fedora server is just using an older version, but there's little call for it at the moment.

Posted by sdh7 at 01:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

Open Source Tools: JXplorer

There are a few other people here blogging about open source now, so I thought I'd toss in my two cents by pointing out some good tools to look at as a semi-regular feature here. I sort of already started this with my post on GanttProject, a project management tool similar to MS Project, as well as an entry on an open source e-Portfolio solution.

One tool I use a lot is an LDAP browser. Now, many people like Softerra as a browser, but it's Windows-only, which means my Macs can't run it. For a while, I recommended LBE, but it's come to my attention that it's not quite freeware, though it may be for educational institutions. Rather than run a risk of getting in some kind of trouble, I sought out other options, and found JXplorer, which is an LDAP browser originally developed by Computer Associates, but later released to the open source community. It seems nicer than LBE so far, and has been worked on in the last 4-5 years, unlike LBE, so it supports modern LDAP enhancements like DSML.

Posted by sdh7 at 05:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack