It’s been a little while since I blogged about anything 🙂

I have a number of Bongo patches on the go, but have only managed to commit one so far – the creation of secure certificates and crypto data that happens when you install Bongo should now be faster. For those with headless machines, hopefully much faster. We’ve also lost our dependency on gnutls’ certtool, which was a common installation problem (people often didn’t realise it was required). I’d love to hear from anyone who has any problems with the new setup.

I’m still trying to excise MDB from the codebase. We’re slowly getting there, but my current replace-MDB-as-configuration patch is taking longer than I thought. But, when it’s done, we’ll be in a much better position: not just not having MDB around, but many of the things which are currently hard-coded into agents will be configurable, and we can start making some serious hawkeye progress.

Unfortunately, my time is a little tied up for the next week or so. From Friday to Monday, inclusive, I’m attending a kind of seminar about success, which I’m sure will make some people laugh!, and then I’m away the following weekend, celebrating my birthday!. So, I don’t have an awful lot of time for pre-LugRadio Live hacking – it’ll be interesting to see what I can do by then. It does mean that for the next week and a bit I’ll be around on IRC less, though, so you’ll have to all live without me for a little while 🙂

There are plenty of jobs for hackers in the meantime, though!

• someone needs to look at log4c, and you don’t need to be a code jockey! Technically, SMTP should be using this logging system, and going through gdb, I can see it’s making the right calls. However, I can’t make it log squat. There is a configuration file in import/log4c/example/log4crc, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. The project homepage and this article might help you figure this out! I think it should just be a matter of getting the right configuration in the right place. Finding other projects that use log4c would also be useful information.
• anyone who knows python can look at running hawkeye under Apache. Basically, the issue is that our session code doesn’t work there. This is a two-part thing: first, telling mod_python which session module to use in the Apache configuration, and then, finding out why the code doesn’t work.
• someone, who doesn’t need to be a code jockey but does need to know about Unix, should find out how we can make agents dump core when they segfault. This should be a combination of setting the right ulimit and possibly other stuff. You can use kill 11 to make an agent seg, I think.