Category: rPath

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Standing up and being counted.

I have for some time now been wondering how many people actually use Bongo.

The reason for this is that we have had images available for a while and I am still non the wiser as to how many people actually use them.

I faithfully spend hours and hours building packages and getting them out the door but have no markers to see if they are being used.

While reading the docs for the ESVA appliance (http://www.global-domination.org/esva) I noticed that they have a cronjob that downloads a file and immediately deletes it. This allows for roughly seeing who is using their appliance .

They have documentation that tells people how to remove the cronjob which effectively turns off this tool.

I propose that the Bongo project perhaps use something similar to allow us to know how many people use the products we produce. it would be nice to know how many people are using Bong while the Web-UI is not working and then once we release something if that number increases and at what rate.

I am really  interested in ideas as to how we can achieve this with or without having some kind of phone home too.

Please leave a comment on this post if you like, or send an e-mail to the user or devel list or even come and have your say on the IRC channel.

I have also added a simple poll on the left

Thanks in advance

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Great News About rPath Images

I have great news about the images on the rPath system.

I have been able to get Bongo 0.6.1 to build on the rPath system with a json patch from Alex.

I have promoted it to the QA and RELEASE repo’s so it should be available for you guys.

Please test and let me know if you have any issues.

You can find the images here

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Bongo rPath Images

I have been trying to get the latest 0.6.1 release of Bongo onto the rPath images. This unfortunately has not been possible due to our reliance on a newer version of Python than what is available on the rPath system.

This is a sad moment as I have been doing that for quite some time now and will not be able to continue.

So for those that have images which contain Bongo on a rPath system please use either the Fedora, Suse or Gentoo packages that we have created.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me over the years and especially Stu Gott who was instrumental in moving the images forward.

If  rPath eventually support python 2.6 I will revisit the images on their platform.

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Images for Bongo 0.6.0

I have been working on the images in the Suse Studio environment as I mentioned in my blog post  here.

I started the investigations to find that our RPM repository was in need of a bit of work. I wanted to create a new repository in my own name that would allow me to build these RPMs for the project.

Thinking about the delivery of the RPM’s I thought it best to open a repository with a generic name namely “bongo-project”.  This would allow more than one person to work on the repository, but for the repository to keep its identity.

Once the repository was setup I realized that I had to learn RPM packaging as I had been so used to the Conary way of packaging that it was almost second nature.

After quite a long time I have been able to get consistent builds from the OBS which have produced RPM’s for a number of OS’s.

Now cam the part that I really to do from the start Create images.

All in all it has been a painless effort as the interface is easy to use and intuitive. I only had to ask for help a few times to find out that the error was mine and not the studio’s. I have created images for the following

  1. ISO Live CD
  2. Vmware Image
  3. Xen Image
  4. USB/HDD Image

These images are all x86 (32bit) and do not have any web interface (well we ripped it out remember)

The only downside at the moment is that they have not created the marketplace yet so any images created will be deleted after a while.  This left me with a dilemma, how do I publish the images?

My solution…..

To create a subdomain on my own website for the bongo downloads.

The link is Http://bongo.haigmail.com

Here you will find a crude yet cute website with links to the bongo tar.gz files. I was impressed with the size of the images about 150mb each which I think is quite good.

For those of you on the rPath images as promised I will be creating one more update to that image set unless there are enough of you that want it. I have a problem in that Bongo does not work on Python 2.4 which is the deployed version on the rPath system.  rPath is not the only OS affected CentOS 5 and RHEL 5 are also affected by this. I have asked the guys to look at why it is failing and to see if they could get it working as soon as I can build it I will.

I would really like to know who of you are using the rPath images as I have no idea how many of you there are. Please post a response here if you do.

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The Bongo Images will no longer be built on the rPath environment

For quite some time now we have been using the rPath rBuilder system to create images for the project. I have also used it for a few other projects.

Things have been going quite well until someone at rPath decided that they needed to reinvent their web interface.

Now I don’t mind change and innovation as long as the changes are well thought through and well tested.

I have experienced some major issues with the new UI and it has overwritten my group recipe on more than one occasion.

I am sure I will edit this post a bit more once I have thought about it a bit more.

We are going to decide how we are going to achieve this in the near future and I will post here what the result is.

Thanks

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Bongo 0.5.2 Package Released on rPath

The new Bongo package has been compiled, packaged and promoted so it should now be available to those running the images.

This version has a number of fixes that were highlighted by the change to the cmake compiler.

Thanks to the hard work of Alex and Patrick we are now in a position to say the the mail store is now stable. I can’t wait for the changes that we will now be implementing on the web front.

The images can be found here

Enjoy

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Bongo Images and the 0.5 release

Bongo Images and the 0.5 release

I have been working on the images for the 0.5 release of Bongo and I have now completed them.

They can be found here http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/bongo/latestRelease

There is a change however in how we will be implementing the images from now on.

I have decided that to make it easier on you guys and also to limit the number of hours I have to work on them I will create a version 1.0 of the images which I will not change for the foreseeable future.

What will now happen is that we will just update the packages that apply to Bongo and release them for consumption.

I have also decided that I will start using the built in features of the rPath rbuilder system to start developing changes or updates to the bongo packages in the -devel branch and then when I am happy that they are ready for general consumption I will promote them to -qa which is an image I will be running permanently I will make this image available to anyone who would want to help test the bleeding edge stuff from Bongo.

Once the -qa has been completed I will promote to the release branch which will be bongo.rpath.org@rpl:bongo-1.0.

This will automatically make the changes available to you guys and so we will become a rolling update project. So you will never have to re-install your server again unless you have to upgrade your hardware.

I hope you find it easier to use. We are now well on our way to making Bongo a great mail server.

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Bongo Images for 0.4.0 Broken

Due to a server error where the images get built an error has crept in that make the images useless.

This error has been prevalent for some time and so it has caused the images to break.

I have therefore pulled the images and will try to fix the problem as soon as I can.

I will post again when things get better