MindTouch Deki

I’ve been playing with this open source collaboration/wiki/mashup software for a couple of weeks now and I have to say that I’m very impressed with it so far.

I set up a wiki website at work almost two years ago using the MediaWiki engine mainly for sharing documentations, which works fine but it could have been much better if certain features came built-in with it.

MindTouch Deki has all these features that I wanted and a lot more.  It’s really designed for enterprise use and that’s why I’m migrating our wiki to this:

• Active Directory/LDAP authentication with SSL/TLS support. There is an LDAP authentication extension for MediaWiki as well which works pretty well but with MindTouch Deki it’s built-in and easier to set up.  It also supports groups.
• Access Control. MindTouch Deki lets you set permissions for each page.  It uses hierarchical pages so if you set a permission on a page, for example, new pages created under it will automatically inherit its permissions.  There’s also a checkbox when setting up the permissions that lets you apply the permissions to all the children pages.  Very easy to do and works with LDAP/Active Directory users and groups.  MediaWiki on the other hand was not designed for this so the access control extensions you’ll find for it will most likely have flaws.
• WYSIWYG editor. There is an FCKEditor extension for MediaWiki but I find it buggy.  The one with MindTouch Deki works really well and you can even copy and paste from Microsoft Word or from another website to it.  I also like how the toolbar follows you when you scroll down while editing a page.
• Easily attach files and images. There’s a button to quickly attach files/images to each page.  Each page also has a separate section for files and images.  You can attach multiple files/images at the same time and MindTouch Deki will automatically detect which are images.  The images section gives you a preview of the images.  You can also add a description for each file/image.
• Search inside file attachments. By default, MindTouch Deki indexes .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .xls, .pdf, .odt, .opt, html, and text files.
• Lots of extensions, here’s a few of them:
  • MySQL – Retrieve data from an external MySQL database as a value, table, list, record, or recordlist and use it in your page.  The table is also sortable, by the way.  You can also use the retrieved values as inputs to other extensions, like Google maps for example.
  • Flickr
  • Dapper
  • Twitter
  • Windows Live (contacts, map, etc.)
  • Google (search, map, calendar, spreadsheet, etc.) – Requires Google API key.
  • Yahoo!
  • AccuWeather
  • Atom/RSS feeds
  • Media
  • Here’s the entire list: MindTouch Deki Extensions

There are still a lot of things for me to play with, so I’m gonna be pretty busy for a while .

Here’s the link to download the open source edition: http://wiki.developer.mindtouch.com/MindTouch_Deki/Download

Microsoft SyncToy v2.0

I needed something simple to backup some files at work to an external drive.  At first, I thought about writing a simple script to do it.  Then I saw a short article about SyncToy from an old issue of Windows IT Pro magazine so I decided to give it a try and I’m glad I did!

SyncToy v2.0 is a free software from Microsoft that lets you “copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers quickly and easily.”  You can also schedule it to run using the Windows Task Scheduler.

I’ve only been using it for a few days and so far it’s working great!

You can download it directly from Microsoft’s website: SyncToy v2.0

FreeNAS

Here’s a pretty cool open source software that you can install on an old machine to use as a network-attached storage (NAS).  It runs on FreeBSD and you can even install it on flash drives (installation including the FreeBSD OS is less than 64MB).

It supports popular services such as CIFS/SMB, FTP, SSH, NFS, iTunes/DAAP, and UPnP.  It even has a BitTorrent client!  All of these can be managed from a web interface.

I haven’t tried all the services but those that I have seem to work pretty well (CIFS, FTP, SSH, UPnP, and BitTorrent).  There is also an option for Active Directory authentication but after I enabled it, it seems to give access to the shares to everyone when using CIFS/SMB, including computers not in the domain I specified (I’m using version 0.69b4).  So I ended up just using Local User Authentication instead.  I created an account with the same username and password as my domain account so I don’t get prompted for credentials when I try to access it.

The UPnP service also worked great with my PS3 and very simple to set up.  Just enable it, add the content you wish to share, select one of the preconfigured profiles or choose custom, enable transcoding and select the temporary directory for transcoded files and that’s pretty much it.

I also really like the BitTorrent client.  Very nice and simple web interface.

I’m running it as a virtual machine on my home network using VMware ESXi.  Installation is pretty straightforward: create a new virtual machine, create a virtual disk for the OS and the FreeNAS software (I allocated 100MB which is more than enough), create an additional virtual disk to store your files, map the FreeNAS ISO image to your virtual CD-ROM drive (connect at power on) and power on the the virtual machine.  Once the ISO image is loaded, choose the option to install FreeNAS to disk.  After that, choose the option to set the LAN IP address and once that’s set just open your browser, point it to that IP address and you can manage everything from here.

Default login is admin/freenas.

Website:  http://www.freenas.org

VMware ESXi First Impressions

I finally got a chance to try this out yesterday on a Dell PowerEdge 6600 server that we use for testing at work.  I’ve been testing it pretty much most of yesterday and today and I have to say that I’m very impressed with it so far.

Installation was very easy: download and burn the ISO image, boot from it, follow the installation instructions on the screen (which is pretty much next, next next), set the root password, and set a static IP address if you want.

To manage it, open your web browser, point it to the IP address of the ESXi server, download the free VMware Infrastructure Client from there and install it on your computer.  You pretty much do everything here: creating and managing virtual machines, data stores, upload/download files, resource allocation, etc.

VMware also has a very cool free tool called VMware Converter for converting physical machines, backup images, and other virtual machine formats (such as Microsoft Virtual Server 2005) to VMware virtual machines.  You can run this while the machine you’re converting is running and you can even convert the machines directly to the VMware ESXi server! Very cool!

So far I’ve converted a virtual machine created by VMware Server and our physical desktop deployment server (BDD 2007) and they both converted successfully with no problems.

I’ll be doing more testing this week and we’re most likely going to be moving our production servers running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and other physical servers to VMware ESXi.  It’s pretty much a no-brainer, especially since ESXi is now free.

Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1

I finally decided to install this on my laptop yesterday since I already wiped it out to prepare it for VMware ESXi (which unfortunately doesn’t support the onboard NIC on my laptop).  I got this copy for free from the Microsoft Heroes Happen Here event and I’ve been avoiding it all this time because of all the complaints about it.

Well, after a few hours of working with it, I have to stay that I’m actually glad I tried it out.  So far I’m very happy with it.  I like the new GUI and the performance seems really good on my laptop.  All the applications that I use work with it and no driver issues so far.  I’m running it on a Lenovo ThinkPad X60s.

VMware ESXi

I just found out last night that VMware ESXi, VMware’s bare metal hypervisor, is now available for free.  I got really excited and wanted to try it out right away so I decided to use my Lenovo ThinkPad X60s laptop as a test machine.  I backed up all my files last night so I can play around with ESXi on it today.

So I installed it from the bootable CD which seem to have installed fine, but when I tried to change the network settings I keep getting the “Restore Network Factory Settings” screen.  It turned out that my onboard NIC is not supported .

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to wait until Tuesday when I get back to work to test it out on our test server (which is in the Hardware Compatibility List so that one shouldn’t have issues).

Apache: Redirecting http to https using a .htaccess file

To redirect http traffic to https in Apache, create a .htaccess file with the following content:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Place the .htaccess file in your website directory and that should be it.

NOTE: The rewrite module in Apache must be enabled for this to work. To check whether it is enabled, open your httpd.conf and make sure the line below is not commented:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

If you’re running Apache on Windows, you won’t be able to create a file with a filename that starts with “.” so you will have to tell Apache to look for another file. To do so, simply open your httpd.conf and change the line:

AccessFileName .htaccess

to

AccessFileName ht.acl .htaccess

Instead of naming the file .htaccess, name it ht.acl. Restart Apache and it should work.

Exchange 2007 SP1: Message rejected as spam by Content Filtering

Error Message: “550 5.7.1 Message rejected as spam by Content Filtering.”

One of our users reported that after we applied Service Pack 1 and Update Rollup 1 to Exchange Server 2007, some of the emails that he has scheduled to send daily were getting rejected with the message above.

I guess the integrated anti-spam in Exchange got updated as well.

You can configure Content Filtering in Exchange to bypass specific users or domains.

Open the Exchange Management Shell:

# To check the Content Filter configuration, type in:

Get-ContentFilterConfig

# To set the Bypassed Senders (example):

Set-ContentFilterConfig -BypassedSenders donotspamme@calazan.com, jdoe@abc.com

# To set the Bypassed Sender Domains (example):

Set-ContentFilterConfig -BypassedSenderDomains calazan.com, *.xyz.com

Important Note: BypassedSenders and BypassedSenderDomains are multivalued properties. When you use the Set-ContentFilterConfig cmdlet, it will overwrite the values of those properties. If you just need to add more senders or domains, please follow the example below.

# To add Bypassed Senders:

$x = Get-ContentFilterConfig

$x.BypassedSenders += “jsmith@google.com”, “bhope@yahoo.com”

# To remove Bypassed Senders (can only be done one at a time):

$x = Get-ContentFilterConfig

$x.BypassedSenders -= “jsmith@google.com”

# To empty the list:

Set-ContentFilterConfig -BypassedSenders $null