Lawrence Poon

I need to backup our department server data remotely, securely, incrementally and  automatically. These are the requirements:

1. The backup is done remotely, data files will be copied from one computer to another computer.

2. The backup is done daily and round-robin scheduled for a week, data files will be copied daily to different folders (such as Mon, Tue...) on another computer.

3. The backup is done securely,  a tunnel between computers to protect data files from prying eyes.

4. The backup is done automatically without human intervention.

Our department server system time was screwed up after the time changed on midnight Nov 1, 2009, the year somehow changed to 2011. All the forum postings and chat postings in Moodle were wrongly timestamped. Of course it caused some confusion to the users as they could not fine their postings in forum and chat sessions.

Moodle uses Unix timestamp to record date/time in the database. Luckily, MySql has two useful functions (from_unixtime and unix_timestamp) to help me to correct the problem.

In Mini How To : Courier-mta 0.62.2 on Fedora 11 (Part III), I had installed SqWebMail, the installation is not difficult, however, the result is not impressive.

There are a couple issues:

In the first part of this blog Mini How To : Courier-mta 0.62.2 on Fedora 11 (Part I), I went through the process of setting up Courier, by downloading and compiling the latest stable Courier-mta. In the second part Mini How To : Courier-mta 0.62.2 on Fedora 11 (Part II), I set up the virtual emails and authenticate against MySQL. In the final part, I set up the webmail front end.

Set up virtual host

ServerAdmin lawrence@joomlaschool.net
DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html index.php index.htm

In my last blog Mini How To : Courier-mta 0.62.2 on Fedora 11 (Part I) I had mentioned I need to upgrade my department courier to Courier-mta 0.62.0. By the time I did the actual work on the Red Hat Enterprise 5.1, Courier-mta has a minor upgrade version 0.63.0.

The first part of the installation is smooth, however, I had a bad time making the virtual email working. I needed to recompile Courier-Auth with --with-authmysql.

Create a system account for virtual emails

useradd virtual
passwd virtual
chmod 700 /home/virtual

It is clear that Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) saves a lot of development effort, specially when the well-designed classes can be re-used in other projects. Typically, when we design the classes for the objects such as User and Course, we need to list out all the instance variables and then create getter and setter methods for each instance variable, it is a lot of work. Most of the time, the name of the instance variables match the name of the fields in the database. Furthurmore, the ways to create the classes are similiar. Is there a way to speed up the development of classes?

I need to upgrade our department Courier mail server in coming months, as a rehearsal, I installed Courier on Fedora 11. There are some requirements for the upgrade:

1. latest stable version of Courier-mta and Courier-Authlib
2. provides virtual email accounts and authenticate against MySQL
3. provides webmail only, no pop3 or imap

Note: The following procedures are based on http://www.courier-mta.org/install.html

For the past two years, I have enjoyed using Mediawiki (version 1.10.1) http://wiki.joomlaschool.net/index.php/Special:Version as my Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS). It is very stable. I did not have any incentive to upgrade it even though there were new releases in every three months.

Based on Drupal: Calendar Tutorial http://heim.ifi.uio.no/inf5270/tutorials/calendar.html, I created a drupal calendar on this site, it seems very good. You can check it out here http://www.drupalschool.net/calendar

To create a drupal photo gallery is not easy as there are many confusing information on the Internet. I want to set up a photo gallery which is native to Drupal, not a bridge or hiding some standalone gallery program behind Drupal. Recently, based on the the procedures provided by Adam Jensen https://webadmin.unt.edu/wiki/create-photo-gallery-drupal, I successfully set up my photo gallery. The method is very complicated, however, Adam provides clear step-by-step documentation to show how to do it. He also explains clearly why certain steps are necessary.