Batland

Hi,

Padre is becoming an open source IDE for perl which is under heavy development. It is written in Perl with wxwidgets for the GUI. Therefore, it is (almost) platform independent and, as far as I know, the only free perl IDE still being actively developed (no, I neither count vi nor emacs as an IDE, even though you can use it as such). So I tried to installed Padre on my macbook pro. The Padre download pages have detailed instructions on that topic, but for me they never worked. So I’ll document my way, maybe someone else doesn’t need to spend one complete evening to install an IDE.

First of all we need to upgrade wxwidgets because leopard uses version 2.8.4. and Padre requires at least version 2.8.8. Therefore, download a source tarball from here. After extracting the file, run the following commands after changing into the newly created directory

mkdir osx-build
cd osx-build
../configure --prefix=/usr/ --enable-mediactrl --enable-listctrl --with-opengl
make
make install

Now you’ve got an up-to-date version of wxwidgets. The next step is to install some requirements of Wx and Padre. I had to install the following modules before installing Wx because Wx depends on them, but cpan doesn’t resolve the dependency for some unknown reason. So you install the following three modules first:

• Test::Base
• Test::Differences
• ExUtils::CBuilder

Some tests of File::HomeDir failed, therefore I forced the installation in the cpan shell via

force install File::HomeDir

I could not use the newest version of Wx supplied by cpan, because it failed to compile (some XS bugs) and cpan onyl provides the newest version of a module, you need to download an older version, I chose 0.95. Before, installed this version by hand, give cpan a try and even if it fails, all dependencies are installed. Then extract the tar file and change in the newly created directory to run:

perl MakeFile.pl
make
make install

Now I suggest to change you cpan settings so that cpan will stop an installation if an required module does not install.This makes life simpler to track down modules which need to be installed by force. In the last step you need to start cpan witht the wxperl executable which is done by:

wxPerl -MCPAN -eshell

And you can now install Padre. After an successful installation you can start padre via /usr/local/bin/padre. Enjoy it. And here some screenshots of padre 0.66.

Bye
Dennis

Posted by: admin | Add comment

Hello,

during the last couple of weeks I spent some of my time to enhance proftpd Administrator. This is a web frontend to manage ftp accounts and the proftpd server. The project’s last release dates back to 2006, but the latest Version (1.2) has a lot of nice features. Therefore, I fixed some bugs and added a lot of new features to it and removed some others. If you find any bugs or need help, just contact me via info(q)batland(d)de where (q) stands for @ and (d) for a dot. So far, this is the only documentation. But, I’ll add some more during the next couple of weeks if needed.
This Version has been tested with FreeBSD 7.3, Ubuntu 10.04 and SLES 10.0, but it should work on any other *nix and Windows, too, as long as mysql, proftpd, php and apache can be installed.
You’ll find all the needed information in the following paragraphs. The changelog is incomplete. I’ve applied many minor changes so that I just wrote down the important changes.

• Added a login system to the web frontend. After 10 login failures the account is automatically disabled and can be reactivated by a script.
• Management of administrators via scripts
• Password generator which is deriviate from the GWP
• Overview of the current active Bans
• support to run script when a group is added or deleted
• A separate interface for users so that they can see their quota stats without having any permissions.
• Activation and deactivation all users of a group
• German translation
• Import of users via a CSV file
• Improvement to the web GUI

• A user only belongs to one group, no secondary groups exists anymore
• Support for postgres_sql (which can be added without a problem)
• Configuration of the proftpd administrator via the webinterface because of security reasons

• Fixes system problems with the parsing of command outputs to generate the system status
• Fixes some security holes such as mysql injection
• Removed the usage of $_SERVER[’PHP_SELF’]
• Added some protection against SQL injection
• Removed warnings and minor errors

You can download the ProFTPd Administrator here.

• Setup Apache including mod_php
• Setup a MySQL Server
• You need to edit misc/database_structure_mysql/db_structure.sql. In line 89 to 94 replace each test at the end of the line by a password for the mysql database for proftpd administrator. In line 97 replace the test123 with a different password. The second account is used by the web interface for regular ftp-uses to display their quotas. This user has only read rights on some tables.
• Copy the following directories to apaches data directory: admin and userView
• Copy the configuration.xml to a directory accessible by the web server, but not accessible via the web server so that no user can download the file.
• Now edit the configuration.xml: You need to change the password in line 10 to the first password you set in the db_struture.sql file and maybe you need to change the IP of the mysql server if it is not running on localhost. Additionally check the lines 52 - 70 regarding the correct paths to the command.
• You need to set the Path to the admin directory in the admin/include_rootpath.php (2. line) and in the 3. line the path to the configuration file.
• Open the userView/index.php and change line 12 - 13 so that the correct password is set (this is the second password you choose in the db_structure.sql) and your database host.
• Before we can setup an administrator account the following Perl modules need to be installed: Term::ReadKey, XML::Simple, DBD::mysql. I suggest to use your OS package manager to install these, because if you have no experiences with cpan, it can be tough.
• Now you need to edit scripts/rootpath.pl. Set the correct path to you configuration in the 1. line including its name.
• The last step is to configure your proftpd. You find an example configuration in misc/proftpd. this includes three files: proftpd.conf, include_mysql.conf and modules.conf. In the proftpd.conf you need to set your IP address and port. Additionally, you can activate TLS or configure additional modules. In the include_mysql.conf you need to set the credentials. This is done in line 13, change test to your password you choose in db_structure.sql. Now start the proftpd server. Depending on your proftpd installation you need to edit the modules.conf file to deactivate not installed modules or to adjust the ModulePath.
• You can change the language of the userView frontend by editing the index file and including a different language file.

• Change the two Password set in /misc/database_structure_mysql/upgrade_to_1.3.sql in line 11 and line 13.
• Execute the SQL Script.
• You can delete all files of the previous version.
• Copy the following directories to apaches data directory: admin and userView
• Copy the configuration.xml to a directory accessible by the web server, but not accessible via the web server so that no user can download the file.
• Now edit the configuration.xml: You need to change the password in line 10 to the first password you set in the db_struture.sql file. Additionally check the lines 52 - 70 regarding the correct paths to the command.
• You need to set the Path to the admin directory in the admin/include_rootpath.php (2. line) and in the 3. line the path to the configuration file.
• Open the userView/index.php and change line 12 - 13 so that the correct password is set

Management of administrators via scripts:

Instructions for use import:

The cvs file needs to have the following format regarding the columns:

1. Username
2. Password
3. Groupename
4. Is deactivated (=1) or is active (=0)
5. Expiration date. Set to 0 if the account does not expire. Otherwise use the following format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
6. Real name of the user
7. Address
8. Notes

Note: The groups of the users need to exist otherwise the import will fail.

A few Screenshots:

(After successful login)

(create user)

(overview of all groups)

(report when the user is created)

(the overview about the used quota for a standard ftp user)

Bye, Dennis

Posted by: admin | 3 Comments

The Batland's Photos blog is strictly devoted to my photography. The photos cover everything except human beings because I believe in privacy and anonymity of the web. Futhermore, I don't believe in photoshop. So all the photos you see are not edited, except for converting a photo from color to black & white.

Feel free to leave a comment ;)

Bye,
Dennis

Posted by: admin | 1 Comment

I’ve never really found an error which google has not at least a few entries covering the error message to some degree. But for a couple of month now I was not able to send a mail from batland.de to a specific mail server, because the mail was always rejected by the postmaster of this particular server, because of this:

Blocked because of fully generic DNS (#5.7.1)

Posted by: admin | 1 Comment

Posted by: admin | 1 Comment

Today, I moved this homepage to become the new main page of batland.de. The delay is caused by a bug in Microsoft's Live Writer. I hate online editors, therefore, I searched for a good and free publishing software and this was Live Writer for me. But after publishing the first article for batland v3 it stopped working. So I started to debug it and then, suddenly, the weekend was over. Therefore, the change is late. I hope I'll have time to write a line during the weekend. I've got a nice patch for proftpd which I would like to publish here.

Bye Mips

Posted by: admin | 1 Comment

Two versions of batland have been online since 2005. I used to only ranodmly publize small IT related articles. The main problem with taht is that the articles become deprected, because of changes in the software, and I seldomly have enough time to write a longer article. Therefore, I haven?t published anything in over a year. I dont really believe in not using batland to publsih anything.

So I had this idea during the last couple of days to move from an article centric page to a more blog like type of homepage. batland.de will not become just a blog. I try to combine a blog with a static homepage so that I can just post some smaller stuff that can become irrelevant in a few month and articles which will be accessable for a long time.

I have not yet compelete the new cms to fit my needs. But the current setup is good enough to go online with it. So back I am.

I don?t know if I will port any of the old stuff to batland v3, but the old version is still accessable here.

So see you soon.

Mips

Posted by: admin |