Autoguilt

Update: Autoguilt is about 65% complete. We have in place the functionality required to add projects, add members to them, add actions for members and receive email notifications. Features that still need to be added include some administrative things (user creation/removal, etc.) and some cleaning up of the core functionality.

Ryan Lewis and I are currently in the initial implementation stages of the Autoguilt application. Autoguilt will be a web application (PHP and MySQL based) that will give users the ability to create projects with members assigned to them. Actions can be created for the project and assigned to the appropriate members. Autoguilt will then take care of politely harrassing these members to complete the actions they've been assigned. This harassment will come from a variety of fronts including, but not limited to, email, Twitter, AIM, IRC(?), etc.

At this time, Ryan and I are working to design the interface to be used for project management. Once this is done, we will be able to work out the finer details of implementing the reminder system so that users can be reminded at custom intervals configurable by the manager of their project. We hope to have this fully operational by the end of the semester so that it can be put to good use by the members of COSI and potentially others as well.

COSI IRC

Update: The comm server continues to run without any serious problems. I added a cron job on the server that checks to see if ircd and services are running and starts them if they are not. We had a few issues with the server being brought down for some reason, resulting in IRC being unavailable until Ryan or I realized what had happened. Also, we fixed an issue where the NickServ service (provided by Anope) did not have the privileges required to perform actions on users (such as kill, necessary for the ghost command). Solving the problem required modifying the O:line for services.

Ryan and I also worked together to install and configure the Unreal IRC server at comm.cslabs.clarkson.edu. Combining that with Anope IRC Services, we've brought IRC back to COSI and have seen a very steady number of users over the past month or so. So far, comm has been fairly stable, with current uptime around 30 days. This should be a low maintenance server that can remain in use for years to come.

New Hardware Setup

Update: The servers are ready to be used but much debate has resulted over what should be done and how it should be done. Ryan and I set up OpenSolaris on the storage server (great because it has ZFS) and Ubuntu on the xen server. The xen server has since been redone by someone else (in favor of an arguably better solution) and some people don't agree that the storage server should run OpenSolaris because we don't know enough about it. I did what I could and at this point I don't really have time to do much else before the end of the semester. I hope that the work I did won't all be wasted, but that's up to the COSI members who will remain after this semester.

I have assisted in the assembly of the 5 new servers for the COSI lab over the past couple months. At this point, we have mounted 4 of the 5 in the server room racks and are beginning to install and configure Linux on each of them. So far, I've worked primarily on the new storage server with Ryan and we've decided to give OpenSolaris a try so we can utilize the extraordinary ZFS software RAID system. ZFS is really easy to use and we will be posting instructions on the wiki in the coming days/weeks.