As recommend by the Microsoft crew I had enabled automatic updates… Big mistake!

After my laptop installed the batch of updates released on the 9th of January my laptop began endlessly rebooting. It blue screens as soon as is starts to load Vista. To make things even better even safe mode does the same thing.

After a process of trail and error with these update I worked out it was caused by KB943899.

Now obviously this doesn’t affect everyone otherwise they wouldn’t have release it… Or would they? Upon search the Internet I found a number of other reports from users with the same problem… I’ve only noticed DELL owners so far - I own a DELL XPS M1330.

I’ve raised a request with DELL as you can’t directly with Microsoft with an OEM license it appears… now we play the waiting game!

I’m running a development server virtual machine on my Vista laptop using Parallels. Trouble is being on a laptop sometimes I’m on the road so a Host only network suits me, but other times I’m at home so I want the guest machine to connect to my home network. Up until now there has been A LOT of screwing around each time I leave and come just change network the network settings…

First of all I tried the obvious Internet Connection Sharing throws some “(null)” error - Google forums to read about it. Bridged networking not that I really understand how this would have helped? this but someone made mention of it… I don’t profess to being a professional at this, BUT the following configuration made my life a dream.

Now I just simply change my the Network in Parallels from “Host only networking” to “Default adapter”..

Router

• IP - 10.0.1.1
• Subnet - 255.255.0.0

Guest

• IP: 10.0.2.10
• Subnet - 255.255.0.0
• Gateway: 10.0.1.1
• DNS: 10.0.1.1

Host

Parrallels Host-Guest NIC:

• IP: 10.0.2.20
• Subnet - 255.255.255.0

Default adapter NIC:

• IP: 10.0.1.20
• Subnet - 255.255.0.0
• Gateway: 10.0.1.1
• DNS: 10.0.1.1

If anyone cares to provide more insight, or has a better solution - would love to here from you! PS. All ip addresses have been changed to protect the innocent

Adding additional Trac and SVN users is relatively simple. With Trac you can do this under Admin when logged in as an administrator thanks to the WebAdmin and AccountManagerPlugins! For adding a new subversion user just use this command:

htpasswd /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd john_smith

This user will then have access to all of your subversion repositories because of the way this server has been setup.

To create a new Trac project follow these steps:

sudo -s -H
trac-admin /var/trac/project initenv
trac-admin /var/trac/project permission add admin TRAC_ADMIN
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/trac/project

Now to setup the new Trac project with the same plugins as the example project. This also uses the same password file. So use unique usernames and users spanning multiple projects will have the same password!

nano /var/trac/project/conf/trac.ini

Add the following to the file:

[components]
trac.web.auth.loginmodule = disabled
webadmin.* = enabled
customfieldadmin.* = enabled
acct_mgr.* = enabled
acct_mgr.web_ui.RegistrationModule = disabled
 
[account-manager]
password_format = htpasswd
password_store = HtPasswdStore
password_file = /var/trac/trac.htpasswd

Then restart Apache!

apache2 -k restart

Now you should be able to point your browser to this addresses to see the new project!

• http://servername/trac/project/

To create a new Subversion repository follow these steps:

mkdir /var/svn/project
mkdir ~/project
mkdir ~/project/branches
mkdir ~/project/tags
mkdir ~/project/trunk
svnadmin create /var/svn/project
svn import ~/project file:///var/svn/project -m "Initial directory import"

After this you’ll see the three directories added.

rm -rf ~/project
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/svn/project
apache2 -k restart

Now you should be able to point your browser to either of these addresses to see the new repository!

• http://servername/svn/project/
• http://servername/websvn/listing.php?repname=project

Particularly if you’re publishing your SVN and Trac over the internet, you should change the defaults passwords for these that were in the VM you downloaded. To change the Subversion password:

htpasswd /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd admin

To change the Trac password (one file is currently used for all trac projects) :

htpasswd /var/trac/trac.htpasswd admin

For security reasons if you’re using any downloaded VM you should not leave the default root password as provided. To change the password:

sudo passwd

You’ll then be asked to enter the original password, then asked twice to enter the new password.

Obviously it’s a bad idea to have a server assigned a different IP address by your DHCP server when it comes up. So here are some basic instructions to set a static IP address on this Ubuntu server.

sudo -s -H
vi /etc/network/interfaces

Then change the following line:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

to:

iface eth0 inet static
     address 192.168.1.100
     netmask 255.255.255.0
     network 192.168.1.0
     broadcast 192.168.1.255
     gateway 192.168.1.254

This is an example only - Obviously you’ll need to work out what to use for each yourself

Trac is a popular open source issues management system written in Python. It also features a wiki and subversion browser. There are also countless plugins that have been created for it some of which I’m surprised aren’t included in the base install.

I’m installing this on a Ubuntu server, so you may need to find installation instructions to suit your distribution! To install the packages:

apt-get install trac libapache2-mod-python

Now to setup our first Trac project:

mkdir /var/trac
trac-admin /var/trac/example initenv

The last command will step you through some questions:

Project name - Being creative I named mine “Example“.
Database connection string - I hit enter using the default.
Repository type - I hit enter using the default as mine is SVN.
Path to repository - My repository for this example was /var/svn/example.

Next you’ll need to make sure your web server can access the files:

chown -R www-data /var/trac/

There are two ways of serving Trac through your web server one using CGI the other using the mod_python which I’ll be using. Include the following in your apache config:

 <Location /trac>
     SetHandler mod_python
     PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
     PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /var/trac
     PythonOption TracUriRoot /trac
 </Location>

This doesn’t include any security as you’ll see in most install tutorials. This is because I plan on installing a plugin to make use of a web based form log in instead.

If you restart apache then open http://ip-address/trac/ in your web browser you should see you list of Trac projects. Log in won’t work yet so we’ll continue…

Installing some Trac plugins

Now we’ll install some plugins you really can’t live without! We’ll start with WebAdmin which an interface for trac-admin command line utility. This would normally be used for adding component names to your projects - something you really should have to drop to a shell for! I’ll also install the AccountManagerPlugin while I’m at it…

First we need to configure the server to be able to install python eggs! This is how all of the Trac plugins are packaged…

apt-get install python-dev
cd /tmp
wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
python ez_setup.py

Now that thats done lets get the plugins installed! Please note you may need to refer to the plugin websites to ensure you’re using the correct repository for your version of Trac.

easy_install http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/sandbox/webadmin/
easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/accountmanagerplugin/0.10

Now that these are installed we need to configure our Trac project to make use of them!

Open the trac.ini file inside under the /conf/ directory of your Trac project. Mine is located at /var/trac/example/conf/trac.ini

[components]
trac.web.auth.loginmodule = disabled
webadmin.* = enabled
acct_mgr.* = enabled
acct_mgr.web_ui.RegistrationModule = disabled
 
[account-manager]
password_format = htpasswd
password_store = HtPasswdStore
password_file = /var/trac/trac.htpasswd

We should setup that password file and create our first account:

htpasswd -c /var/trac/trac.htpasswd admin
trac-admin /var/trac/example permission add admin TRAC_ADMIN

Some plugins also use caching if you don’t follow this next step you’ll run in to some nasty errors (Permission denied: ‘/root/.python-eggs’) ! This is because the web server can’t write to the location they use by default… So:

mkdir /tmp/trac-cache
chown www-data /tmp/trac-cache/

Then include this line in your apache config along with the others for the /trac directory.

SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /tmp/trac-cache

Then restart apache and cross your fingers!

Update!

After my success with this install I started looking at Trac-Hacks through all of the other plugins and also decided to install the following (I’ll update this as I find others):

• CustomFieldAdminPlugin

When downloading a few Virtual Appliances I’ve found they haven’t had network connectivity ‘out of the box’. I’ve only noticed this with Ubuntu servers so far but admittedly I haven’t downloaded a lot of other flavors!

This appears to be because the MAC address for eth0 is different to the one of the creators VMware Server. Using the following command you’ll notice eth1 is seen instead:

ifconfig -a

I then just simply copied the MAC address shown and updated the MAC address listed against eth0 in /etc/iftab. Then restart the server.