PureAdmin Developer Log

Package update for 0.4

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:41:31 GMT

The autopackage of 0.4 was incorrectly (or lazily) built against Ubuntu 7.04, which means it didn't correctly run on old distributions. I've now uploaded an update package with this problem fixed.

This should also fix any issues with FAM not being detected and logfile viewer being disabled.

NOTE: This only affects the binary autopackage package. Nothing has changed with the source code.

New release: 0.4

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 13:55:50 GMT

There's been a lot of minor changes in svn the last year or so, and so far I've been too lazy to push a public release.

Well, here it is: Pureadmin 0.4!

Release highlights:
New features:

Show list of system changes needed before using user manager
Progress bar showing download/upload progress

Bug fixes:

Don't fail because the pureftpd activity directory doesn't exist.
On ubuntu, it is always removed on reboot and created on first FTP login. Pureadmin now understands this
More robust handling of creating ftpuser/ftpgroup accounts and ftp directory.
Easier to enable debug output (no re-compile needed)
Check /proc to determine whether pureftpd is running or not. More robust than looking for the PID-file.

Also some translation updates and other bug fixes.

Autopackage and source tarball available on the download page.

phpBB forums have been made obsolete

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 15:59:16 GMT

Due to the relatively high amount of spam, I've decided to lock down the user forums and instead move the discussions to google groups. The new place to discuss PureAdmin on the web is:

http://groups.google.com/group/pureadmin-discussions

The forums will still be available, but they will be read only. It is still a useful place to search for questions asked by other people in the past.

Updates in svn

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 11:10:30 GMT

There has been a lot of bug reports in the forum about Pureadmin not working correctly on Ubuntu dapper, especially with regard to finding the PureFTPd configuration files.

I've made a lot of changes in subversion that should fix this, and I've tested it successfully on Ubuntu dapper. There has also been 64-bit fixes, and Pureadmin now runs 100% fine on (at least mine) 64 bit systems.

People who has experienced problem with 0.3 are advised to try to download and install directly from the svn repository. See the download page for information on how to check out the development version. Just make sure you uninstall any previous version from your system.
Post your experience as comments on this post or in the forums. A note saying "everything works perfectly" is just as good as "no, it's still buggy because ..."!

Hopefully I'll get some spare time soon to make a proper release, but I want to test this in the wild a bit first.

/isak

Fedora Core 4 & 5 RPMS

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 14:28:52 GMT

Dr Pixel has created fedora core packages of PureAdmin.

Fedora Core 4 :

Fedora Core 5 :

To use the YUM repository :

rpm -ivh http://drpixel.tuxfamily.org/fedora/drpixel-release-1-1.noarch.rpm
yum install pureadmin --enablerepo=drpixel

Just a disclaimer: These packages are third party packages and has not been tested by the PureAdmin developers (i.e. Me :-)).

Switch from CVS to Subversion

Tue, 23 May 2006 20:33:17 GMT

I have migrated the PureAdmin source to use Subversion instead of CVS. The download page has been updated with information about how to get the code from svn.

There aren't a lot of improvements in the source since 0.3, but a few nice fixes has found its way into the "trunk", including a couple of translations from the new Rosetta translation page. Great work everyone who has contributed!

isak

Rosetta translations

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 18:39:06 GMT

I've recently imported PureAdmin into the Rosetta project which allows translators to translate the program online, using the web browser.

To be able to translate, you must first create a login on launchpad. After you're logged in, you can
start translating the program on PureAdmins Translation Page.

Happy Translating!

New Release: 0.3

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 16:18:47 GMT

A new version of PureAdmin has been released: Version 0.3

Download source: pureadmin-0.3.tar.gz
Download Autopackage (Linux x86 binary): pureadmin-0.3.x86.package

Whats new: ChangeLog

/isak

Forums are down

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 11:51:05 GMT

The forums are currently down due to a (mandatory) migration to the new mysql4 servers on Sourceforge. But a combination of really slow Sourceforge servers, my Internet being crappy right now, and other random events, I haven't been able to fully migrate all data yet.

I will post here as soon as they are working again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: I think I managed to get it working now, mail me if there are any problems
/isak

New Release: 0.3pre1

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:08:42 GMT

I've just released a pre-release of PureAdmin. It should be fairly stable (no bugs that I know of) but I haven't tested it on other systems than my own.

Whats new: ChangeLog
Download: pureadmin-0.3pre1.tar.gz

No autopackage is provided for this version - only source. Sorry for the inconvenience.

/isak

Checking in...

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 12:25:22 GMT

I've made a pretty large checking to CVS now. It contains all the new code that I've been working on lately. It is running fine here on my machine but I'd like some feedback from other people before I do a release. If you're brave, then grab the source from CVS and let me know how it works. Even if it works perfectly, please post a note in the comments of this blog or in the PureAdmin forums with some short info on your system - like what distro/version, desktop etc. you're on - and how PureAdmin worked for you.

Thanks,
isak

Internal cleanups

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 19:09:09 GMT

I've been doing quite a lot of coding on PureAdmin the last couple of days! Not much of it is directly user visible, but hopefully it will provide a more stable and flexible code base to add new features to.

First of all, I've decided to make PureAdmin multi threaded. It wasn't a big change actually, but now the GUI won't be locked if the fetching of server activities takes a long time.

Second, I've moved away from the code generation stuff in Glade and moved on to use libglade instead. Although this introduce a hard dependency of libglade, it is my belief that it is worth it. The code gets so much easier to work with, and most distributions ship libglade by default anyway.

Moreover, I've made some cleanups to the build system, and started using intltool for the translations. This will allow easier translation from a lot of different file formats, such as XML and desktop files.

Oh, and I've removed the stupid need to call the external pureadminsearch script. All that logic has now been re-written in C...

Obviously, I don't have any screen shots, and none of this code is yet in CVS... But I'm confident it will land there eventually :-)

/isak

Long time - no code

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 14:04:15 GMT

It happens to all of us I guess, when things_to_do > time_left_of_week. I haven't written many lines of pureadmin code the last 6 month.

Today, however, I decided it was time to code some more.

PureAdmin with system tray notifications

Whenever a user connects or disconnects, PureAdmin will put a nice icon in the system tray with a tooltip explaining what just happened. Clicking on the icon will bring PureAdmin up front and remove the icon from the tray. Of course this behavior can be disabled for those who just don't care about notifications. It's a nice feature nonetheless... :-)

This will land in CVS as soon as I'm satisfied with it.

UPDATE: It's in CVS now... and I'm also working on some new stuff. Stay tuned!

Wacky idea

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 11:45:56 GMT

I got a wacky idea the other day. What if I made the Virtual users support plug-in based? Wouldn't that be cool?

The code in 0.2 is already clean enough that an additional plug-in layer wouldn't be that hard to add. And the possibilities would be great. MySQL support could be added and used where supported and wanted, and skipped for those that don't want it/need it.

Also, people that use other methods in PureFTPd (such as LDAP, PostgreSQL or some other - not yet existing - method) could then create a small plug-in for PureAdmin and as such be able to manage those users.

GLib comes with some nice methods for using plug-ins and I managed to create a sample plug-in system in less than 10 minutes. If I only had more time on my hands :-)

Any comments on this? Is it just a wacky idea that wont be useful other than in theory?

/isak

0.2 bug

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 20:13:19 GMT

I've had a couple of reports of a bug in Pureadmin 0.2 (actually,the bug is in all versions, but it just surfaced). The symptoms are that the user manager isn't working properly, i.e. complaining about permission issues when there should be none etc. It occurs on machines where the password files are somewhere else than /etc, for instance /usr/etc or similar.

I've made a quick and dirty fix for this in a patch against the 0.2 sources. The code is also in CVS.

I'll make a more correct fix as soon as I get some spare time, and then release a 0.2.1 bugfix version. Just waiting on Autopackage to release 1.0 which should be out pretty soon.

/isak

Delayed release

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 11:26:31 GMT

I was going to do a 0.2 release yesterday, honestly. However, when doing my Release Ritual. I found some nasty bugs with the way pureadmin handles UTF-8. This has been an issue since forever, but it's only recently I've become aware of it, since I switched my system encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 the other day. Apparently. when PureAdmin gets a string in some other locale than what LC_ALL specifies, it will crash and burn.

So I spent the entire day yesterday fixing a better error recovery when receiving bad strings from i.e. /var/log/messages or similar. It also introduced a new problem.. What encoding should be used for pure-ftpd user names? It can handle UTF-8, but that may propose problems with a lot of clients. The result is that it is now configurable... Not an optimal solution, but unfortunately the only one I could think of.

Fig.1: The new "Select Encoding" preferences with filtered list of available encodings

This needs some more testing so I will postpone the release a while. It's not in CVS yet, but will be later.. when all the quirks are straightened out.

/isak

Forum update

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 11:26:05 GMT

There was some fuzz about a worm that was infecting vulnerable versions of phpBB and replacing the content of the site with the string "This site is defaced!!!".

Luckily, we haven't been hit by this bastard yet, but I'm taken the safe path here and have upgraded to the latest version.

/Isak

Automatic password prompt

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 14:55:53 GMT

Today, I made some progress on the "run-pureadmin-as-root" issue. By using Honglis libgnomesu, pureadmin is now able to automaticly ask for root password if it is needed.

So, if you start pureadmin as a normal user, you'll get this:

Pretty neat, huh?

Best part is, the check for libgnomesu is done at runtime, so if it can find libgnomesu, it will prompt for password, otherwise it will continue as normal. For the technically inclined people, this is accomplished using dlopen(3). I'm planning on making FAM-dependency use this approach aswell. When this is done, pureadmin is truly autopackage friendly.

The code is not committed to CVS yet, since I have to make some changes to the configure script and do some more testing. I think I'll need to bug jolg a bit, forcing him to test this out on his machines...

As soon as I'm somewhat confident that I haven't missed anything, I'll commit it for the rest of the world to try out!

UPDATE: It's in CVS now

/Isak

Window size and position

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:02:09 GMT

Someone requested a feature for PureAdmin: Save window size and position.

It turned out to be really easy to implement; GTK+ provides some really easy functions for getting and setting size and position of its widgets. Both the size and position is saved, as well as the position of the divider (the movable line dividing the "online users" list from the "activities" list). The code is in CVS...

Don't beleive me? Well, here's the proof:

/Isak

Gethostbyname and API

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 23:55:21 GMT

gethostbyname
As I've written before I'm working on a communicationpackage for PureAdmin and things are moving forward.
Though I ran into "trouble" today. The gethostbyname() function didn't manage to look up my ip-address and
it turned out to be namelookup-problem. I tried running host my.host.name but without any luck.
After 10 minutes of googling I still don't know exactly why.

If anyone has a quick answer to how i could fix this, please send me a message!
This is what host spits out: "Host caimeara.home.sen not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)".

The API
Isak took a look at the communication-"package" today and it seemed like he liked the API.
He had a few pointers on things that could be cleaned up and I think things are moving in the right direction!

/Jörgen

PureAdmin roadmap and random thoughts

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 22:02:04 GMT

Today, I decided to scribble down some of my thoughts on PureAdmin and where it's heading. As you perhaps may have read in this hacker log, we're currently working on splitting the GUI from the backend.

The roadmap is in CVS, which can be viewed here. I'll try to summon up some of the points here though...

0.3 and beyond

From now on, pureadmin will consist of two parts:

A backend, which is a headless daemon
The frontend, which is the GUI, that should look like and behave like it does today

The daemon can be on the same machine as the GUI, but it doesn't have to. This means that the machine running pureftpd doesn't have to have X/GTK installed (only glib) to be able to use PureAdmin on it!

This allows for some nice features:

Multiple GUIs could be written: QT/KDE, ncurses, GTK+ (I'll be focusing on this)
Special purpose apps, such as panel applets, notification systems etc.
Remote administration.

This sounds great, what's the catch?

The bad part of this (there is always a bad part) is that security issues must be more considered since we're practically starting a server that allows manipulation of the running ftp server. We cannot accept security flaws in the implementation and/or design!

Any thoughts and comments from anyone interensted in security are mostly appreciated! Please post in the forums or on the mailing list.

See the full roadmap for more details on my thoughts on security. Basically it is very hard to create a user friendly GUI that just works at the same time as it's very secure!

This will do for now. Please please, I'd love to hear your comments on this! It's no fun coding if nobody comments on our work...

/Isak

Which OS are you?

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:34:27 GMT

So I'm:

Not that I feel that way, but ok they're probably right =)

PureAdmin

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 23:09:28 GMT

isak finally started working on splitting pureadmin into a daemon and a client.
Actually this was supposed to be my work but sadly I didn't get very far before I got bored, for some reason.
Currently I'm working on a communication "library" for isak to use in his splitting, though I've had some trouble
with a few rather silly bugs. I realise it was probably more than six months since I did any C-programming at all.

Anyway I've had lots of fun the last couple of days using all my gdb-knowledge.

Some pureadmin hacking today

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 14:51:07 GMT

Did some hacking on PureAdmin today. Fixed the dirbrowser bug reported in the forums. It should now place the directories in ascending order, from A to Z. It's in CVS!

Development is rather slow now since real life is taking all available time. Perhaps it will get better when school starts in a couple of weeks...

Lots of bug reports! Nice...

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 18:33:13 GMT

Got a couple of bug reports in the forums. Keep them coming and perhaps, just perhaps, I will be able to make a stable release that doesn't spit core dumps all over the place :-)

Sometimes I really wish I did this project in a more high-level language.. While C is a beautiful and wonderful language, it sometimes can cause headaches and frustration...
I seriously need to do a in depth source scan to eliminate those bugs!