1. Setting up a automated backup on Collax is easy, but where to put the data?
2. I don’t have another computer running 24/7 to share some harddisk space.
3. I don’t know of an internet service that shares space via SMB or NFS.
4. I don’t want to connect another harddrive to the box, since it’s running between our bedroom and Jonas’ Kinderzimmer. It’s a special silent pc from ichbinleise.de, and it’s really quiet. I don’t want to ruin that with a noisy harddrive.

The only solution I could come up with was to store backup the data on the server itself. But — in case of a hardware crash that doesn’t help me a lot. I need to get the data off of the server, including the email notification with crucial content how to restore the data (which is sent with every backup run to my local email account).

Saving the E-Mail

The first part was trivial: I just created a rule in Thunderbird to move any email starting with “Backup Information” to a local folder. All other emails can continue to live their happy live on the server, from where I can access them over IMAP.

Saving the backup

This was tricky (for me) - all you *nix gurus out there will possibly yawn at this. The solution I was after was that every time I logon to my ubuntu desktop, it will fetch/sync the backup data from the server to my local PC.

The outline solution was to allow root ssh access from my PC only and trigger a script on each logon which ssh’s into the server and get’s all the files. This sounds so easy in retrospect I’ll assume you have some basic knowledge about ssh, keys and how to automate logon. From here the steps were as follows:

1. On the CBS I needed to allow root to login from remote, but restrict it to running a command that would copy the files over. In order to do that, I edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set the options PermitRootLogin to forced-commands-only and PermitUserEnvironment to yes:
   

   admin@scheff:/etc/ssh$ sdiff -s sshd_config sshd_config_orig
   PermitRootLogin forced-commands-only                   |    PermitRootLogin no
   PermitUserEnvironment yes                      |    #PermitUserEnvironment no

2. I edited the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys to include the from and command option. The first restricts the login as root to distinct servers, in my case only to my local desktop machine called “andreas-desktop”. The second option includes the command to be executed, whenever a login as root is detected. Note that this is all in a single line:
   

   root@scheff:~/.ssh# cat authorized_keys
   from="andreas-desktop,andreas-desktop.intern.karroum.de",command="rsync -avz /var/lib/afbackup/ser
   vers/lokal/mount/ andreas@andreas-desktop:/home/andreas/Backup" ssh-rsa AAA............

   As you can see I am planning to use rsync to transfer the backup files from /var/lib/afbackup/servers/lokal/mount to a local directory /home/andreas/Backup

3. Where’re close to the solution now Third step is to create a shell script which is executed on every logon. I included a little ping wait because first the WiFi network connection needs to be established with the network manager. The script is really tiny and just looks like this - with ’scheff’ being the name of my server. Don’t forget to add execution rights (chmod +x filename) to the script after saving it:
   

   #!/bin/sh
   ping -c 10 -w 120 scheff
   ssh root@scheff

4. The last step is to tell Ubuntu/Gnome to start the script with the user session. Go to System -> Settings -> Sessions and add the script you just saved.

Done

1. I had no idea how to install the root certificate on my phone, from which I intend to access my emails as well as from my ubuntu desktop and anywhere else.
2. Thunderbird (and other email clients) had some weird problem with the certificate: it complained that the used hostname didn’t match the one in the certificate, although the error dialog clearly showed the opposite. Unfortunatly also the otherwise always helpful support forum for the Collax Business Server was clueless.

A while after I created the issue with Thunderbird, somebody replied on it with the resolution. It’s actually not Thunderbird, which is wrong (except for providing a error dialog that is not very helpful in analysing the error condition), but the certificate. This is what I excpected, but I had no idea what to change in the certificate. It turned out that if you use alias names in your certificate, which I do because the server can be access under a variation of names (like blog.karroum.dyndns.org for our blogs and bilder.karroum.dyndns.org for the picture gallery), you need to repeat the CN of the certificate! Once I did that,Thunderbird was happy with only my own CA imported. Problem one resolved.

One problem remaining. How can I convince my phone that this is a trusted server for the encrypted connection? Up to recently, I had to confirm on every connection attempt to my own server that the certificate should be trusted. Importing the CA to symbian phone is not so easy as you might think it is.

The certificate has to be in binary DER format. Collax can export certificates only as PEM (which is Bas64 encoded), if you don’t want your private key to be included. Thus, I had to convert it first. In general Jacco de Leeuw’s article “Importing certificates on Symbian” was very helpful.

Converting the certificate to DER

It all boils down to download and install openssl and then issue the following command. In my case my exported PEM certificate was CA.crt, DER encoded certificate ended up in CA.cer:

openssl x509 -in CA.crt -out CA.cer -outform DER

Installing the certificate

After the certificate is in the right format for use with Symbian, you now have to install it in the phone. This sounds easier that it actually is. You have to transfer it to the phone, and then place it in the right … place. I mailed the certificate to myself, because I can access my emails from my mobile, but you could also use an internet service, where you can upload you certificate for you to access it with your mobile browser. By doing so you save the hassle of making sure your MIME types etc. are configured correctly for downloading certificates. How to install it in the phone after it’s on it, is also well described in above mentioned article from Jacco de Leeuw.

Conclusion

1) These days, nothing is simple.

2) Funny enough it works nice on my E90, but not on the N80i. The latter still asks me everytime, if my server can be trusted. No solution to that problem yet.

Have fun, everbody!

Reasons to leave my previous Company (Nokia Siemens Networks) were numerous, the final trigger was that the R&D department of my business unit in Düsseldorf  was transferred to Tata Consultancy Services.

After some search I finally found codecentric (it was the other way round, to be exact). We offer consultancy, software development and training while specialising on Java performance, architecture and open technologies. But more than the technological orientation of the company, the personality of the founders, the athmosphere and company culture convinced me to switch to codecentric - and as far as I can tell after my first day, this was the right decision.

I’m looking forward towards my new challenges, which I even can adress together with one of my former collegues from Nokia (Fabian Lange) , who happened to do the same switch. Finally, working is fun again

When a new technology (or better a methodology) like SOA is not only difficult to master on it’s own, but also hyped (means, proposed by people, who have never written a line of code in their life), it is not a surprise, that “there are instances, where projects are going well, but most are over budget and under delivering, ” says David Linthicum from Real World SOA. He even proposes a money-back guarantee to share the risk, if the consultants take the training on the job on the client’s dime. As this is clearly a little over-provocative, he has a point that it is easy to fail in your job to implement a SOA sucessfully.

Rik de Groot, Viktor Grgic, Vincent Partington, and Gero Vermaas from Xebia posted the top 10 SOA Pitfalls for you to avoid the most common mistakes. They categorized these into implementation, architectural, and most importand also organizational pitfalls. These are the most dangerous, since with SOA also has to come a shift in the organizational culture, which reacts ponderous, sluggish and unwieldy to any attempt to change it. Thanks for the excellent and insightful postings.

With the knowledge about these Top 10 SOA pitfalls, maybe you can give your clients a money-back guarantee!

Testcases are described in HTML tables, as well as the test results:

Features include:

• Enables easy-to-use tabular syntax for creating test cases in a uniform way.
• Provides ability to create reusable higher-level keywords from the existing keywords.
• Provides easy-to-read result reports and logs in HTML format.
• Is platform and application independent.
• Can natively use both Python and Java test code.
• Provides a simple library API for creating customized test libraries.
• Provides a command line interface and XML based outputs for integration into existing build infrastructure (continuous integration systems).
• Provides support for Selenium for web testing, Java GUI testing, running processes, Telnet, SSH, and so on.
• Supports creating data-driven tests.
• Provides tagging to categorize and select test cases to be executed.

Now the only thing missing, to avoid that others have to go through the same pain as we had to, is the Robot Development Kit. That’s an Eclipse/EMF based editor for anything you need for Robot. It solves all the pains that you have with HTML editing, merging HTML in a version control system, etc. I hope that will be open sources at some point as well!

1. Bajofondo Tango Club: Mar Dulce. My most heard album in the last months; at work, in the car, at home and soon maybe also at our dancing lessons. Very entertaining Tango pieces.
2. Lonnie Jordan: War Stories. A little exausting if consumed at a whole, which is a compliment, since the enthusiasm, energy and detail within these funky songs deserve more than to be heard just as a soundtrack to something else.
3. Jack Johnson: Sleep Through The Static. Nice - as the others from Jack Johnson.
4. Lizz Wright: The Orchard. Not much listened to, yet. But this voice deserves an extra round or two in my music player with my full attention.
5. R.E.M.: Accelerate. At first I really disliked it, but it got better with each time I listened to them again. Still, it’s ok but not more.
6. Duffy: Rockferry. “Mercy” is great, even after listening to it for how many times? Also the radio keeps playing it (all summer long, I assume; they found their summer hit?) On the other hand, I have the feeling that the music industry looked for (and found) a replacement for Amy.
7. Amy Winehouse: Back to Black. Boring.