Author: Olivier Berger

Scripting mysql database backups on phpMyadmin with CURL

Sometimes, you can only access your MySQL database with phpMyadmin (the previous tool I blogged about won’t be helpful, then). But you may wish to backup the database on a regular way.

PhpMyadmin allows you to backup the database, but you may like to do it in an unattended way.

I’ve written a shell-script which will use CURL to do so.

I couldn’t find any such script… so I hope I didn’t reinvent the wheel 😉

Update 2008/04/15 : I have made some modifications to the script, and it is now in SVN. You may grab a copy from the picoforge project’s websvn.

Report from FOSTEL 2007

I’ve had the chance to attend the FOSTEL (Free Software/Open Source Telephony) summit last week.

It was a very interesting conference, gathering lots of different projects.

There were people involved in VOIP, protocols, PBx, IM, collaborative applications, porting Linux to various devices (including phones/smarphones, PDAs).

I can’t remember everything, but here are some bits for the record :

Some of the interesting talks I remember is the one of Sean Moss-Pulz from FIC about OpenMoko and the FIC Neo1973. Very interesting ideas like some viral transmission/flashing of phones OS via some phone holding images 😉 Besides the joke, he explained that many companies seem interested in managing the software stack deployed on a fleet of mobile devices inside the company, kinda custom distro for employees phones ? That may make sense, and explain interest of some for libre software phone stacks. All components in OpenMoko will be libre software, and the only part left proprietary should be the GSM driver stuff : guess what, operators/carriers don’t seem to want you and mess with the GSM protocols 😉

Interesting info : the Telenor operator and partners (including Trolltech) apparently want to provide free/gratis access to their GSM network for libre software developers ! Very valuable contribution indeed. More details at the places mentioned in Knut Yrvin’s slides.

We’ve been discussing new user interfaces in a BOF, also, which gave me the oportunity to talk about Internet rabbits (nabaztag/tag) as new kind of devices using new user interface models (RFID tags, voice recognition, etc.). Funny that these folks were not really aware of that wonderful toy.

I will try and update this post when I get pointers to new interesting presentation slides.

GET/INT new domain : new email address

We’ve got a new domain for GET/INT.

Instead of int-evry.fr, you may now use int-edu.eu. This is supposed to give us a more european image, I suppose 😉

Of course, this means my email-address is changing accordingly… just add the new suffix after olivier.berger@ (antispam counter-measure here 😉 )

Also, my blog has a new address, then : http://www-public.int-edu.eu/~berger_o/weblog/

Remote logging console in case of crashes

I’ve tried and debug kernel crashes happening on one system, by sending its console messages to a remote machine.

I hope it will enable me to see what’s happening as it crashes, since most of the oops are lost when I look at the physical console.

Anyway, in order to do that, I configured the crashing machine’s kernel to use the netconsole module to output console messages on the network.

Here’s the setup in /etc/modules on the crashing machine (whose IP is 192.168.0.2) :

netconsole netconsole=6665@192.168.0.2/eth0,6666@192.168.0.1/00:12:34:56:78:90

It will instruct the netconsole module to dump the logs on port 6666 on system 192.168.0.1 whose MAC address is 00:12:34:56:78:90.

On the logging machine (192.168.0.1), I installed syslog-ng to be able to dump the logs coming from netconsole into a log file. Here’s the setup :

source netlog {
udp(ip(0.0.0.0) port(6666));
};
destination netlog
{
file("/var/log/netconsole.log");
};
log
{
source(netlog);
destination("netlog");
flags(final);
};

I had tried previously to use cancd, but i prefer to keep all logs in one single file.

Hope this helps

Hello planet phpGroupware

Hello planet phpGroupware !

I’m not a developper of the project, but as a contributor to Picoforge, which uses phpGroupware for its infrastructure, I’m from time to time confronted to internals of the project, so I’ll probably have things to say about it.

At the present time, I’m considering how I can do Apache authentication in phpGroupware for SSO among all Web applications integrated in PicoForge, instead of having the standard PHP/web form login dialog. There seem to have been some code included in phpGroupware, but the stable version doesn’t seem fully ready for that… so I think I’ll have to patch.

And yes, we wanna stick as much as possible to Debian etch’s version of phpGroupware, even though things we’re interested in are probably more or less there in HEAD (special dedicace à Caeies;).