LinuxWorld interviewed me recently concerning OpenGroupware.org. The interview is part of their "Spotlight on Open Source in business" series.

Regular visitors will know that I post strictly concerning technological issues; I've got little use for, or desire to be, a pundit of any kind at all. I have a firm belief in experts and on the great debates of our time I've got little or nothing original to add - not that I'd expect anyone to listen even if I did (Why would you? Who am I?). But I just couldn't resist posting a link to OOXML, looking forward. It is concerning Open Source, etc... so it isn't far off the mark of the usual content here, but it is more "big picture" then I usually indulge. Basically the gist of it is here:

But most importantly, it is a time for all of those strong advocates of open standards to stop talking, and start walking. I look forward for all that energy that went into discussing the pros and cons of OOXML to join an open source project and start contributing code, documentation, support, create support forums, file good bug reports and help us make free and open source software better.

The world as a whole could do with less talk. I suppose this applies to almost every conceivable realm from priests and politicians all the way down to the lowly coder. But it is the one thing I can think of that simply can't be said often enough: less talk, more do.

Ok, thank you for that minute, I now yield the podium to the next gas bag.

The first MOSG meet-up has been scheduled. The meeting is scheduled for the afternoon of April 19th at the home of Bruce Smith (a MOSG founder). If your interested in attending please RSVP to John Bridleman . I'll be presenting on the basics of IPv6.

The getAuditEntries method was added to the zOGI API as of r920, and added to the ZideStore trunk in r2095. getAuditEntries provides the ability to retrieve the audit entries from the server's database that have occurred since a specified entry. Using this feature a service can page through server changes and synchronize some repository; this allows functionality equivalent to that provided by MOGIMon but without a back-door database connection. Since audit records are serialized with integer ids in the OpenGroupware database this acts very much like the uSNChanged attribute provided by Microsoft Active Directory.

A list has been created specifically for the Funambol GroupDAV connector. You can subscribe here. Be at bit patient as the site in questions is a little slow. It isn't clear if archives of this new list are available.

I've recently worked with a pair of NetGear GS716T switches and want to warn everyone off from buying these switches. While the price is pretty low and performance is very good, the feature-set is entirely bogus. NetGear advertises these as "smart" switches with VLAN, SNMP, etc... Only all these features are useless as the web interface to configure the switch simply doesn't work and no command line interface (via either telnet or SSH) is provided. If you attempt to configure the switch from FireFox you will be constantly prompted for the password, and you can't actually get past that to make any configuration changes. On the other hand, if you use IE6 you can sign in to the switch but the interface is extremely unstable. On one switch I was unable to even set an IP address, upon clicking "Apply" it would close the browser and revert to using the address it acquired via DHCP. On the other switch it took the IP address but attempting to configure port based VLANs resulted in erratic behavior ranging from hanging, to displaying raw HTML, to renaming all the other VLANs and removing all the ports assigned to other VLANs. The administrative interface of the NetGear GS716T is simply unacceptable; NetGear has clearly not performed even a minimum of quality-control or testing on the GS716T.

In October 2006 I wrote a simple Turba driver that used POGI to provide an OpenGroupware address source to the Horde application suite. I'm now working on HordOGo which will provide real integration with Horde. Hopefully HordOGo will eventually be accepted into the Horde trunk and bring OpenGroupware support on equal footing with Kolab.

OpenLDAP 2.3.8 has been released, with numerous fixes and enhancements. In addition to fundamental stuff like N-Way Multimaster & Mirror Mode and improved configuration backend this version introduces back-sock. With back-sock it becomes possible to build out-of-process backends that do... anything. This is an exciting opportunity fo

PostgreSQL 8.3 not longer performs automatic casting of INT to TEXT when INTs are compared to character types. This change is documented in the release notes. This change causes a database exception to occur in OpenGroupare's ACL processing. The specific error is:

ERROR: IN types character varying and integer cannot be matched


ACL queries like the following cause the exception because they contain a condition that compares string value to an array of integers: auth_id IN ( 9981, 9991,... where auth_id is a VARCHAR(255) value.

The Jabber-Net project has finally [and rather amazingly if you know the jumbled history of this project] issued a release 1.0 announcement. Lots of great new features including DNS SRV as well as GSSAPI support. License is either GPL or JOSL.