openATTIC 2.0.9 beta has been released

With a somewhat shorter release interval than usual and just in time for Chemnitzer Linuxtage, we would like to announce that a new beta version 2.0.9 of openATTIC has now been published and is available for download.

This release fixes an issue that caused oaconfig install to not perform all necessary all installation steps when run the first time.

It also includes a number of installation and portability fixes to the Nagios configuration and plugins (thanks to Erick Jackson from SUSE for contributing these!).

In addition to that, a lot of improvements were made to the RPM packages for RHEL7 and derivative distributions.

We also updated and restructured the installation instructions in the documentation in order to make the installation more straightforward.

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openATTIC Mumble Server

Mumble is a free open source voice communication software. It offers high quality sound, multi-platform support and ecrypted voice communication. The installation of Mumble is really easy, but when you want to include your own ssl certificate it starts to get complicated.

Our Mumble server is based on Ubuntu 14.04.03 Trusty. First of all we have to start with the installation of the Mumble server.

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Linking to Jira issues in Nikola using the issue_role plugin

Our release announcements (like the one for openATTIC 2.0.8) usually contain a lot of references to issues on our issue tracker in the form of issue ids like OP-XXX.

However, Nikola, the static site generator that powers this blog, did not provide an easy method to convert these issue IDs into URLs pointing to our issue tracker automatically. Converting each issue ID into an URL manually using the existing reStructuredText link syntax felt too tedious.

But fortunately Nikola provides a plugin system, that allows you to extend its functionality quite easily!

After some discussion with the Nikola developers on the #nikola IRC channel on Freenode, we came to the conclusion that the best approach would be to extend the reStructuredText markup language with an additional explicit role.

And that's what we did - our pull request was accepted and the new plugin issue_role is now available from the Nikola plugin repository.

The installation and configuration is pretty simple - simply run nikola plugin --install issue_role and configure conf.py as described, by setting ISSUE_URL in the GLOBAL_CONTEXT. In our case, we added the following to the configuration file:

GLOBAL_CONTEXT['ISSUE_URL'] = "http://tracker.openattic.org/browse/{issue}"

In our blog posts, we now enter issues as follows, and Nikola takes care of converting them into URLs:

Created plugin that automatically converts Jira Task IDs to URLs
(:issue:`OP-741`)

Running nikola build converts this into the following HTML:

Created plugin that automatically converts Jira Task IDs to URLs (OP-741)

We hope you find this useful!

openATTIC 2.0.8 beta has been released

How time flies - it's time for our next release! Today, we released version 2.0.8 of openATTIC. Some highlights of this release:

In this version, we mainly improved the code quality, QA tests and usability of the openATTIC Web UI. For example, it's now possible to delete multiple volumes at once. We also removed some unnecessary options which could confuse the user.

In addition to that, we adjusted our tests according to the changes mentioned before and made further improvements to the JavaScript code base to be conformant with established coding conventions/standards (according to jshint and jscs).

The build script make_dist.py is now included and can be used to create the "pristine source" tar archive (e.g. openattic-2.0.8.tar.bz2), which acts as the input file for building RPM and DEB packages. The latter ones can now be built using the provided build_deb_packages.py script.

In the process of porting openATTIC to SUSE Linux (SLES 12 and Leap), we also started reworking and improving the configuration files, so openATTIC is more portable across different Linux distributions (in particular regarding the Nagios configuration). We'd like to thank Eric Jackson from SUSE for his contributions in this area!

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Collaborating with SUSE

Yesterday, we announced that it-novum (as the main sponsor of openATTIC) and SUSE have agreed to collaborate on the development of openATTIC (see the press release for more details).

SUSE has a long history and a notable reputation as a key contributor to Linux and open source software in general. We feel honored and proud that they approached us about this opportunity.

Our cooperation has two main objectives, that I would like to explain in some more detail below.

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openATTIC 2.0.7 beta has been released

We are pleased to welcome you to the first openATTIC release for this year and are happy to announce openATTIC 2.0.7 beta! You may wonder: "What happened to version 2.0.6"? Due to a missing code merge, we decided to do 2.0.7 right away - sorry for the noise.

Some highlights:

For this release, we integrated the Django REST framework token authentication into our REST API, so you can request your authentication token via the API now and use it in scripts or other applications instead of the user name and password.

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Replacing text in multiple files using the replace utility

First of all, a Happy New Year to you all!

A new year has begun, so it's time to update the copyright headers in the openATTIC source tree!

While there are countless options for resolving this task, I have become quite fond of a little gem hidden in the MySQL Server distribution called replace. It does exactly what you would expect from its name - from the manual page:

The replace utility program changes strings in place in files or on the standard input.

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