Lonely Lion

ONLamp.com: Building an Address Book with OpenLDAP [Mar. 27, 2003]

I need to sit down and learn this stuff. LDAP has sooo many uses.

O’Reilly Network: Developing Movable Type Plugins [Mar. 19, 2003]

Cool, I’ve been looking for a concise article like this for a while.

I pushed Plone into production last night. I’m pretty happy with the interface. I like the idea of being able to add pages easily, and not having to worry too much about design. I had some problems getting Zope’s Virtual Monster to work, but eventually got it going. Zope, in general, is the hardest easy tool I’ve used. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not too bad, it’s just VERY DIFFERENT than other tools of it’s kind. The object-orientedness of it is a huge sea change to the PHP-ish world I’m used to. Zope is Python based, and has adopted Python’s use of OOP and its”lots of great stuff in the standard library” philosophy.

So far, Python is absolutely blowing my mind. I’m very happy with it and Zope.

I’ve been playing with Plone for the past few days, and finally decided to make the jump. Plone is now the Lonely Lion frontpage. It makes more sense, as Lonely Lion has become more than a just a Chris McAvoy weblog. It’s also the home to a few games and some movies. I’m hoping that this new Plone fronted site will give some people the opportunity to carve out their own LL space. Although I’m not holding my breath, I do hope to see some “community” building.

plone.org – Welcome to plone.org

Looks like a great CMS system. Zope based, slick looking, I’m going to check it out ASAP.

I may have to write some SNMP stuff for work, so I’m checking out the options for interacting with SNMP in Python in Perl.

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It’s a way to write scripts against hardware. So, for instance, if a network switch has an SNMP interface, it’s easy to write a script (using the SNMP protocol) to go out and do something useful, like query usage statistics, or turn a port off.

Some notes, and initial sites to check out:

• RFC 3411 The SNMP RFC
• PySNMP A Python SNMP Module
• Net::SNMP A Perl SNMP Module
• Walk the SNMP Walk An O’Reillynet article on SNMP

It’s a start. I’d prefer to write this in Python, as it gives me a solid reason to work in Python for a while, but it looks like Perl might have a leg up in module documentation and road testing.

Welcome Gloin to the Lonely Lion family server farm. Gloin is a 300-something mhz PII with 64 mb of RAM. Gloin is running Debian 3.0R1, and will be used primarily as a Zope web app server.

I’m pretty impressed with how easy Debian was to install. It’s not for a first-time *nix user, but for me it was a breeze. I was able to install the base, and a bunch of packages (including Zope) in a night. Very impressive.

To get a taste of Gloin, check out the Zope based Wiki and Slash-clone I set up.

Catchy title eh?

Zope is running like a champ on Solaris, with one small problem, I can’t get the MySQL adapter to work. I was looking at the stable packages distribution for Debian Linux and saw that they have the whole Zope ball of wax. I’ve got a spare system, so I’m going to build it out with Debian, and use it exclusively as a Zope server.

MUD’s. I played for about a month or so one summer. MUD, short for “Multi User Dungeon” (some say Dimension, think Dungeon is cooler), is about as nerdy as I go. They’re multi user text based adventure game. The games are played using telnet, or some similar client, and usually adopt a D&D sort of flair. I’ve gotten a MUD framework installed on one of my systems, it looks pretty cool so far. It’s called SMAUG, and shows a lot of promise. I’m hoping this will be the game of choice, now that BNT is sort of winding down.

I’ll write more as it develops a bit.

After a long time away, I reinstalled Zope on one of my Solaris servers.

servers is relative, one man’s Ultra 5 is another’s server.

We had an outage for about a week. I was on vacation, when a big windstorm knocked down the microwave dish on my roof. Sorry folks.