December 13, 2006
messenger.case.edu progress
We've made a few changes to messenger.case.edu in the last few hours. We did the DNS and virtual IP address magic necessary to let us use ports 5222/5223 instead of the alternate ports we were using earlier. In fact, there shouldn't be anything listening on the old ports anymore, so don't use them.
Also, if you've been trying it out already, but can't connect now, you may need to flush your DNS cache.
Posted by sdh7 at 04:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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 22, 2006
Partial 2-way iCal Synchronization
While fighting with some of the post-installation issues we've experienced after the calendar upgrade, I thought of a way which would allow people to at least create events and invite other users to those events in the calendar using a non-Oracle client.
The "secret iCal URL" service we offer takes advantage of a calendar utility called uniical (most Oracle Calendar utilities start with "uni-" for historical reasons that are somewhat lost in the mists of time). uniical not only can export .ics out of the calendar, but it can import it back in too. See where this is going?
I'm thinking we'd set up a service that allows users to self-register a URL where their .ics is published - this would probably work best for those using Google Calendar, and would be just as good for those publishing via WebDAV here or elsewhere. We would then set up an hourly(?) process that wgets the registry of URLs, and uniical -import's them into the calendar. With the right invocation of uniical, it should also check attendee's e-mail addresses and if they match the e-mail addresses of users in the calendar server, sets them as invitees.
I've tested the basic principles - I've published an .ics file, and then imported it using uniical. It's not real 2-way synchronization - there's no way to mark you will attend something someone else set up - this would just allow you to create events using iCal or Sunbird or Google Calendar, and invite other users to your events.
I'm just proposing this as a potential idea for the future, and implementation would depend on interest and time being available to do it.
Posted by sdh7 at 10:40 PM | Comments (4) | 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