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Category: LoneStar Network

My own cloud

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Keeping faith to my previous words on cloud computing, I’ve decided to work on my own installation of ownCloud.

ownCloud is a service developed by the KDE team which aims to realize a personal storing and sharing platform for files and information.

In simple terms, and using words now commonly spread in the world of web 2.0, it is a personal Dropbox system managed and installed on our own systems, using our own ip addresses and our own disk space.

It’s actually a webDAV service with some bells and whistles, including a small PHP management and configuration portal. WebDAV is not new, it’s been out for years, but recentlly it’s gathering popularity due to its usage in all modern shared disk space services.

Requirements are really minimal: you need a Linux distribution with Apache, PHP, mySQL or SQLite for backend, and some disk space. I’ve assigned to it the same virtual machine I’m using for monitoring, and I’ve added a virtual disk within vSphere’s datastore.

Actually it’s still missing something to be a full Dropbox replacement: a local sync client, allowing to keep a local folder in continuous synchronization with the service, and allowing to copy the content on several installations. A client is on the works but it’s still not ready.

Currently it’s possible to use ownCloud through webDAV on all devices supporting it, and it can be “mounted” on KDE’s Dolphin, adding a new network folder.

For the adventurous LoneStar Network users who are willing to test it, you can to have an account. As soon as there will be userfriendly clients ready for use on Linux/Mac/Windows I will publish proper instructions, and the service will become part of LoneStar Network’s offering for its users.

Habemus Monitoring!

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Due to the big push we’re having at work for the use of IT proactive monitoring systems, to keep customers’ systems and devices under control, I’ve decided to do the same on my LoneStar Network and I’ve installed Zenoss – an opensource solution for monitoring IT items.Zenoss is distributed by a company selling it for enterprise usage, but the Core version is available free of charge, and it comes with all the features needed to reach a nice result.

I’ve dedicated a Slackware64 virtual machine to it, and after one day of work it came out to a pretty much enjoyable state. By the use of SNMP, WMI for Windows systems, and SSH for some quite ancient systems, now I’m keeping under control all LoneStar Network’s systems, a Linux VPS that I rented in the United States and all RedBaron‘s servers. This also includes email and sms alerting for critical issues, with delay – in case the problem should auto-fix within a while -, scheduled maintanence windows, and automatic repair attempts to restart those services that should suddenly stop.

A great result!

New website

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As you can see, I’ve put the new website online.

Some details are still missing, some image galleries and something else, but the most has been done and so I decided it was enough to deserve being made available to the public.

As I had announced, I’ve moved off from Xoops and migrated contents to WordPress, currently version 3.0.1. Most of the work has been related to migrating old articles and then finding and configuring plugins to achieve all the functions that I wanted to enable.

Main new features are:

  • 2-columns layout on the right, in the inner column I’ve put those items related to the site itself (archives, login box, etc.), while in the outer column I’ve put those more “social” elements: links to Facebook, Twitter, Grooveshark, etc.
  • Better Facebook integration: besides logging in with your facebook account, you can comment, click on “like” button, report articles and comments on facebook, invite fb friends etc.
  • Social contents improved: there are new modules with my tweets from Twitter, my dents on Identi.ca, my books from Anobii, my music from Grooveshark and more stuff to add in the future.
  • Better handling of multilanguage: whole site is available both in italian and in english, without strict dependence among the two, which means that the english articles don’t have to be a direct translation of the italian articles but they can be totally independent, related to other arguments, etc.
  • Network community page: I’ve moved all links and functions related to users of LoneStar Network private services to a specific page named Network Community, which can be accessed from the menu bar under the header.
  • Blog look-and-feel: for many years I’ve been using a “portal” layout for the site rather than a blog layout, with the presence of forums, which I’ve always considered being more democratic. But during the years, almost nobody has ever used the forums and the few interactions I’ve seen have come from comments to my articles. So I’ve decided to remove the forums and give more relevance to my posts.

Any comment, critique, compliment, insult is well accepted, as usual 🙂

Vacation: time of changes

LoneStar 0 Comments
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I’m on vacation for three weeks starting today. It’s the best time of the year! 🙂

I want to make good use of this free time to make some changes here on LoneStar.it. Actually I’ve made up my mind thinking that there’s no more reason to keep using Xoops to manage the site. This because the most part of the site is managed by WordPress, embedded within Xoops by a module. Unfortunately this module is developed by a japanese community which doesn’t publish much in english, and it takes a lot of work to adjust the latest versions. Furtherly, if I’m using WordPress for the most, then why not moving to bare WordPress and quit dealing with adjustments?

Another thing is that most of recent modules which integrate content from the most famous social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. are mainly developed for WordPress. I do use many social networks and I’d like to add content from them on my site without too much hassle.

WordPress will also give me better tools for a bilingual website, allowing to easily write posts in two languages and link posts in italian to their translated version in english, manage bilingual categories and tags, etc.

That’s why in the upcoming days I’m going to migrate LoneStar.it to WordPress, trying to save previous content and taking the chance to experiment some new aestetics.

Wish me good work!

New WordPress and Facebook Connect

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I’ve just completed an important update on the site, and I’m rather happy for the result.

First of all I’ve removed the old Xpress 2.0.5 module, that is WordPress for Xoops, which was not being updated since years ago and contained a very old version of WordPress. I was using this module to manage the News and Articles section.

Yesterday I discovered a new module developed by a japanese guy, which is named XpressME. This module seems to be an evolution of the previous one, and it’s rather updated, considering it contains WordPress 2.7, the latest version available.

This allows me to use all the most recent WP plugins, and particularly it helped me achieving Facebook Connect integration, something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time.

With Facebook Connect users can comment news and articles with no need to register on the portal, but rather using their Facebook account. When a user authenticates through Connect, his/her name and profile picture are automatically recognized and appended, and his/her comment is made visible on Facebook’s newsfeed to be visible to his/her friends on social network. Furtherly it’s possible to invite Facebook friends to join discussions on the site.

As soon as I’m done with testing, I will add same functions to UnixPortal.

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