Category: OSS

Interesting Network Infrastructure Developments

I was recently asked for a few bullet points on some recent “interesting network infrastructure developments”. In the five minutes I had, I offered the following:

  • TRILL – Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links – a new layer 2 routing protocol which promises to replace STP. What’s really interesting about TRILL is that it does not need to be loop free; there are no blocking ports; and frames can take the shortest path. See http://www.ipjforum.org/?p=582 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_(computing). 
  • Open Networking Foundation – https://www.opennetworking.org/ – “The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a non-profit consortium dedicated to the transformation of networking through the development and standardization of a unique architecture called Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which brings direct software programmability to networks worldwide. The mission of the Foundation is to commercialize and promote SDN and the underlying technologies as a disruptive approach to networking that will change how virtually every company with a network operates.” – members include Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
  • OpenFlow – http://www.openflow.org/ – “OpenFlow enables networks to evolve, by giving a remote controller the power to modify the behavior of network devices, through a well-defined “forwarding instruction set”. The growing OpenFlow ecosystem now includes routers, switches, virtual switches, and access points from a range of vendors.” – adopted by Googleand others. 
  • OpenCompute – slightly off networking but relevant – http://opencompute.org/ – “A small team of Facebook engineers spent the past two years tackling a big challenge: how to scale our computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible. … Everyone has full access to these specifications. We want you to tell us where we didn’t get it right and suggest how we could improve. And opening the technology means the community will make advances that we wouldn’t have discovered if we had kept it secret.”

Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and PHP 5.4 (again)

My previous post, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and PHP 5.4, has been extremely popular but I left some work for the user to figure out.

In a nutshell, here is how you install PHP 5.4 in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

1. Install the signing key for the PPA (which also adds the sources to apt):

add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5

If the above command is not available, install it using:

apt-get install python-software-properties

2. Now update the package database and then upgrade the system. As part of upgrading, PHP 5.4 will be installed automatically:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Now, you should have PHP 5.4 installed:

# php -v
PHP 5.4.3-4~precise+1 (cli) (built: May 17 2012 13:00:25)
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies

As an aside, at the time of my previous post, PHP Memcache packages were not available from the PPA but that has since been rectified.

Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and PHP 5.4

UPDATED in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and PHP 5.4 (again) (May 22nd 2012).

I was looking forward to trying out some of the new features in PHP 5.4 when I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 this morning. Unfortunately, Ubuntu decided to stick with 5.3 for this release.

There is upgrade path available though via a PPA (Personal Package Archive) from Ondřej Surý at https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/php5.

I’ve just installed it and it’s working fine with Apache:

$ php -v
PHP 5.4.0-3~precise+4 (cli) (built: Mar 27 2012 08:50:50)
Copyright (c) 1997-2012 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2012 Zend Technologies

 

New Replication Features in MySQL 5.6

I’ve just been reading an article on replication in MySQL 5.6 and there are quite a few new cool features that will vastly improve replication environments with MySQL. Some of these include:

  • Optimised row based replication (documentation here) – replication used to mean execute the exact same queries on the slave server(s) as the master. This, as you can imagine, was incredibly inefficient. With row based replication, the resultant changed row of an INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE operation was replicated saving significant resources on slave servers. This was a big win. It now looks like it’s been further optimised in that only the changed elements (and a primary key) need to be replicated.
  • Introduction of Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) allowing the source and sequence of a replication statement to be globally unique within a replication cluster. This with some cool new utilities (mysqlfailover and mysqlrpladmin) create a lot of native options for failover for maintenance or failure (see more about GTIDs and the utilities).
  • Time delayed replication allowing a slave to purposefully remain behind the master for any given delay. This may be a life saver for that table you accidently dropped!

There’s a lot more too and you can read about it all here.

ViMbAdmin 2.1 Released – POP3/IMAP Access Restrictions

We’ve just pushed a new release of ViMbAdmin – version 2.1. The main highlights are:

  • it’s now possible to restrict access to a mailbox via either IMAP, POP3 or both. See this page on the wiki for more information.
  • it’s our first release requiring a database migration. But it’s really really easy – see this page for those instructions.

As always, a live demo is available at: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/.

“Learnings from open-sourcing Bootstrap”

Mark Otto, the man behind Twitter’s Bootstrap posted a good article summarising his experience on the open source process.

His own tl;dr version is:

Open-source is awesome, sometimes work is hard, be excellent to each other, do what you love, fuck yeah.

Looking at New Features in PHP 5.4

PHP 5.4 was released at the start of March and heralds a key new feature which I have long bemoaned the lack of: traits.

Traits (see PHP’s documentation and Wikipedia’s description) allow programmers to define a set of functions which can be shared among different classes in ways that normal inheritance cannot do.

A Trait is intended to reduce some limitations of single inheritance by enabling a developer to reuse sets of methods freely in several independent classes living in different class hierarchies.

I’ve banged my head against the desk a number of times trying to work around the lack of traits in PHP and I hope PHP 5.4 makes its way into mainstream Linux distributions a lot quicker that 5.3 did.

There are also a number of other interesting features which look really cool:

  • Simpler array dereferencing: $secondElement = getArray()[1];
  • A shortened array syntax: $a = [ "foo" => "bar", "bar" => "foo" ];
  • A built in web server (for development) which could be really interesting – see here.

 

TallyStick, ViMbAdmin and a CSS/JS Minify Tool

It’s been a busy few weeks:

  • We launched TallyStick – a time tracking and billing tool – two weeks ago and have pushed some bug fixes and updates. So far so good!
  • IXP Manager, an open source web application to assist in the management of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) that we built over at INEX, got a complete UI refresh thanks to Twitter’s Bootstrap;
  • Similarly, our open source email domain / mailbox / alias management tool called ViMbAdmin got a major version bump, lots of new features and a UI refresh also;
  • We also just open sourced (BSD) our (admittedly small) Minify tool which makes minifying, bundling and versioning the manner JS and CSS files that make up websites these days a breeze. Check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/opensolutions/Minify.

“Go Faster” Websites – Introducing Minify

We’ve been minifying and bundling CSS and JS for years to ensure quick page loads of the applications we build. We’ve now generalised, documented and packaged the tool we use for this and released it under a BSD license so others can benefit.

Most web developers know that including lots of JS and CSS files in their sites slow page load times down. Most also know that these files should be minified and bundled into one file on production sites. Most developers don’t do this though. It’s a lot of extra steps in putting your new changes live.

Also, using CDNs or setting expiry times into the future for mostly static files such as CSS and JS also significantly improves page load as clients will grab these files once and use their local cache until their expire. This also poses issues for web developers that is easily overcome by versioning these files – literally adding a version number to the bundles – for example min.bundle-v6.css would be version 6 of the CSS minified and bundled file.

We’ve been doing both of these for a long time with the sites we build. We’ve now generalised, documented and packaged the tool we use for this and released it under a BSD license so others can benefit. See our page on GitHub to download this tool and for examples of its use:

https://github.com/opensolutions/Minify

This tool will:

  • automatically find all CSS/JS files in a given directory named xxx-blah.css where xxx is a three digit ordering / sequence number;
  • minify these files and create a single file bundle including them in the correct order;
  • automatically generate template include files allowing production / development mode (i.e. use individual CSS/JS or bundles based on an application option);
  • versioning for those using CDNs, future expiry dates, etc to ensure clients load fresh JS/CSS bundles.

If you use it, please drop us a note to let us know how you get on! 

ViMbAdmin :: New Release 2.0.6

Today, we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of 2.0.6 which has a number of incremental fixes and improvements.

Just over a week ago, we released V2 of ViMbAdmin which was a complete UI refresh.

Thanks for all the feedback and bug reports since then.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of 2.0.6 which has a number of incremental fixes and improvements including:

  • Domain is now ‘sticky’ when moving between mailboxes, aliases and logs making it much easier to browse a single domain;
  • A cookie is now used to remember the page length for individual users;
  • We now use grouped icons with tooltips rather than labelled buttons throughout;
  • The horrible your IP address has changed message is gone.

As usual, a full change log is available here and the packaged release can be downloaded directly here.