RT VMWare appliance

RT Users
1

Tonight during Battlestar Galactica, I put together a first draft of a
VMWare RT Appliance built on Ubuntu Breezy. bzipped, it’s about 300 megs. I’m
not likely to have the cycles this week to coordinate some sort of
public mirroring process and our current hosting provider would look
askance at us putting up something 200 times the size of an RT
distribution for public consumption. Does anyone have the cycles, pipe
and interest to make this thing available for people to try out?

Jesse

2

Tonight during Battlestar Galactica, I put together a first draft of a
VMWare RT Appliance built on Ubuntu Breezy. bzipped, it’s about 300 megs. I’m
not likely to have the cycles this week to coordinate some sort of
public mirroring process and our current hosting provider would look
askance at us putting up something 200 times the size of an RT
distribution for public consumption. Does anyone have the cycles, pipe
and interest to make this thing available for people to try out?

You beat me to it. I have a version using Ubuntu Breezy using Oracle XE
been testing this week and have more or less the same problem with
hosting the VMware file.

Joop
Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

3

You beat me to it. I have a version using Ubuntu Breezy using Oracle XE
been testing this week and have more or less the same problem with
hosting the VMware file.

I only beat you because my testing involved “reboot, go visit the login
page. It compiles! Ship it!” (This is very much not something we’ve
‘productized’ at this point :wink:

Jesse

4

Hi Jesse,

Tonight during Battlestar Galactica, I put together a first draft of a
VMWare RT Appliance built on Ubuntu Breezy. bzipped, it’s about 300 megs. I’m
not likely to have the cycles this week to coordinate some sort of
public mirroring process and our current hosting provider would look
askance at us putting up something 200 times the size of an RT
distribution for public consumption. Does anyone have the cycles, pipe
and interest to make this thing available for people to try out?

How much bandwidht do you think it is gonna take? :slight_smile:

Jesse

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5

distribution for public consumption. Does anyone have the cycles, pipe
and interest to make this thing available for people to try out?

How much bandwidht do you think it is gonna take? :slight_smile:

Make it an torrent, should lower the bandwidth requirement.

Panu

6

distribution for public consumption. Does anyone have the cycles,
pipe and interest to make this thing available for people to try out?

How much bandwidht do you think it is gonna take? :slight_smile:

I agree, we have dual T1s, I can’t host something like this but I’d be
glad to seed a torrent of it for a while…

Jay
Jay Lee
Network / Systems Administrator
Information Technology Dept.
Philadelphia Biblical University

7

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Give me the torrent details… I’ll put it up relatively permanently, and forward you the info so you can add it to the seed file. (768kbit upstream).

(This will be on a personal system, not a Time Inc. system).

Brian Gupta

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.5 (Build 5050)

iQA/AwUBRBXF6qCo3Yt1MVNwEQLt6wCgldNfqdsScE7OyHz7ehcFSI6AexYAoJs8
J/Eg9EMhyW22it/yJnzJBJal
=Ifm5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

8

I just had a “Hey!” thought on this… Why not post it at the VMWare Community site?

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/community.html

That was we can leech off of VMWare/EMC’s bandwidth…

Michael Eraña, CISSP
CTO
PC Network, Inc.
eranam@lanusa.com

|=> -----Original Message-----
|=> From: rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com
|=> [mailto:rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf
|=> Of Brian_Gupta@timeinc.com
|=> Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 2:20 PM
|=> To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com
|=> Subject: [rt-users] Re: RT VMWare appliance
|=>
|=> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
|=> Hash: SHA1
|=>
|=> Give me the torrent details… I’ll put it up relatively
|=> permanently, and forward you the info so you can add it to
|=> the seed file. (768kbit upstream).
|=>
|=> (This will be on a personal system, not a Time Inc. system).
|=>
|=> Brian Gupta
|=>
|=> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
|=> Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.5 (Build 5050)
|=>
|=> iQA/AwUBRBXF6qCo3Yt1MVNwEQLt6wCgldNfqdsScE7OyHz7ehcFSI6AexYAoJs8
|=> J/Eg9EMhyW22it/yJnzJBJal
|=> =Ifm5
|=> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
|=>
|=>

9

You beat me to it. I have a version using Ubuntu Breezy using Oracle XE
been testing this week and have more or less the same problem with
hosting the VMware file.

I only beat you because my testing involved “reboot, go visit the login
page. It compiles! Ship it!” (This is very much not something we’ve
‘productized’ at this point :wink:

I have been testing my setup and can’t get it any smaller then 6Gb
system and 2Gb swap which can be shrunken to about 980Mb.
I have to say that this is a Ubuntu ‘Workstation’ install which means it
has X installed and probably a whole lot of apps and services which you
don’t need. I could find my way around a terminal only installation but
a lot of people can’t. So the questions is, is this size acceptable or
should I try to dump as much unneeded stuff as I see fit?
This installation uses Apache 2.0.xx with mod_perl-2.04 and FastCGI,
OracleXE production release, RT-3.4.5, RTFM-2.2RC3, AT-1.2.3rc4 and MySql
4.x is also installed so can potentially used by RT.

Joop

Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

10

I would love something like that as I have always built a system to test
things on it. Maybe we could create it out ubuntu-server or maybe
xubuntu which uses XFCE I think as the window managerFrom: rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com
[mailto:rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf Of Joop van
de Wege
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 8:55 AM
To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: Re: [rt-users] RT VMWare appliance

You beat me to it. I have a version using Ubuntu Breezy using Oracle
XE
been testing this week and have more or less the same problem with
hosting the VMware file.

I only beat you because my testing involved “reboot, go visit the
login
page. It compiles! Ship it!” (This is very much not something we’ve
‘productized’ at this point :wink:

I have been testing my setup and can’t get it any smaller then 6Gb
system and 2Gb swap which can be shrunken to about 980Mb.
I have to say that this is a Ubuntu ‘Workstation’ install which means it
has X installed and probably a whole lot of apps and services which you
don’t need. I could find my way around a terminal only installation but
a lot of people can’t. So the questions is, is this size acceptable or
should I try to dump as much unneeded stuff as I see fit?
This installation uses Apache 2.0.xx with mod_perl-2.04 and FastCGI,
OracleXE production release, RT-3.4.5, RTFM-2.2RC3, AT-1.2.3rc4 and
MySql
4.x is also installed so can potentially used by RT.

Joop

Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com
Commercial support: sales@bestpractical.com

Discover RT’s hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O’Reilly Media.
Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com

We’re hiring! Come hack Perl for Best Practical:

11

I have been testing my setup and can’t get it any smaller then 6Gb
system and 2Gb swap which can be shrunken to about 980Mb.
I have to say that this is a Ubuntu ‘Workstation’ install which means it
has X installed and probably a whole lot of apps and services which you
don’t need. I could find my way around a terminal only installation but
a lot of people can’t. So the questions is, is this size acceptable or
should I try to dump as much unneeded stuff as I see fit?

I did my install in ubuntu’s “server” mode. I can get a compressed disk
image of about 300 megs. (I’m running behind on getting the announcement
of the torrent site out due to some family stuff.) Of course, the
bugzilla VMWare image is about 50 megs. We’ve got a ways to go to keep
up with the Joneses :wink:

Jesse

12

I just had a “Hey!” thought on this… Why not post it at the VMWare Community site?

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/community.html

It sure looks like that’s only a directory pointing to others’ download
sites.

Jesse

13

Hi,

I recently modified some queue names and make sure that it reflects my .fetchmailrc, however, when I run fetchmail, I got these errors:

fetchmail: WARNING: Running as root is discouraged.
1 message for trouble at mail.example.com (1073 octets).
reading message trouble@mail.example.com:1 of 1 (1073 octets) .Argument " 3.17_01" isn’t numeric in subroutine entry at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site _perl/5.8.7/HTML/Formatter.pm line 106, <> line 1.
An Error Occurred

404 Not Found
fetchmail: MDA returned nonzero status 75
not flushed

Apache http-err.log has this line:

[Mon Mar 20 08:56:00 2006] [error] [Mason] File does not exist: /usr/local/rt3/share/html/rt//REST/1.0/NoAuth/mail-gateway

I’m not sure how to set this right, but mail-gateway is located inside
/usr/local/rt3/share/html/REST/1.0/NoAuth/
and not the path that was constructed above…

I’m not sure but I had this problem when I changed WebURL, WebPath etc. in my RT_SiteConfig.pm because rt is the only content in my web server and I have changed my DocumentRoot to the share/html path of rt…

Given my setup above, are these settings correct???

Set($WebPath , “”);
Set($WebBaseURL , “https://rt.example.com”);
Set($WebURL , $WebBaseURL . $WebPath . “/”);
Set($WebImagesURL , $WebPath . “/NoAuth/images/”);

Now in my httpd.conf:

DocumentRoot “/usr/local/rt3/share/html”

PerlModule Apache::DBI
PerlRequire /usr/local/rt3/bin/webmux.pl

<Directory /usr/local/rt3/share>
AllowOverride All
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks

Order allow,deny
Allow from all

RewriteEngine On RedirectMatch permanent (.*)/$ $1/index.html AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 SetHandler perl-script PerlHandler RT::Mason

Any idea??
Thanks…
-jay

Yahoo! Mail
Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze.

14

fetchmail script get mail and fires rt-mailgate. right? May be you
have wrong option --url when you run rt-mailgate from fetchmail
script?On 3/20/06, jay alvarez rtb0y@yahoo.com wrote:

Hi,

I recently modified some queue names and make sure that it reflects my
.fetchmailrc, however, when I run fetchmail, I got these errors:

fetchmail: WARNING: Running as root is discouraged.
1 message for trouble at mail.example.com (1073 octets).
reading message trouble@mail.example.com:1 of 1 (1073 octets) .Argument "
3.17_01" isn’t numeric in subroutine entry at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site
_perl/5.8.7/HTML/Formatter.pm line 106, <> line 1.
An Error Occurred

404 Not Found
fetchmail: MDA returned nonzero status 75
not flushed

Apache http-err.log has this line:

[Mon Mar 20 08:56:00 2006] [error] [Mason] File does not exist:
/usr/local/rt3/share/html/rt//REST/1.0/NoAuth/mail-gateway

I’m not sure how to set this right, but mail-gateway is located inside
/usr/local/rt3/share/html/REST/1.0/NoAuth/
and not the path that was constructed above…

I’m not sure but I had this problem when I changed WebURL, WebPath etc. in
my RT_SiteConfig.pm because rt is the only content in my web server and I
have changed my DocumentRoot to the share/html path of rt…

Given my setup above, are these settings correct???

Set($WebPath , “”);
Set($WebBaseURL , “https://rt.example.com”);
Set($WebURL , $WebBaseURL . $WebPath . “/”);
Set($WebImagesURL , $WebPath . “/NoAuth/images/”);

Now in my httpd.conf:

DocumentRoot “/usr/local/rt3/share/html”

PerlModule Apache::DBI
PerlRequire /usr/local/rt3/bin/webmux.pl

<Directory /usr/local/rt3/share>
AllowOverride All
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks

Order allow,deny
Allow from all

RewriteEngine On RedirectMatch permanent (.*)/$ $1/index.html AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 SetHandler perl-script PerlHandler RT::Mason --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Any idea??
Thanks…
-jay

Yahoo! Mail
Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze.

The rt-users Archives

Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com
Commercial support: sales@bestpractical.com

Discover RT’s hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O’Reilly Media.
Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com

We’re hiring! Come hack Perl for Best Practical:
Careers — Best Practical Solutions

Best regards, Ruslan.

15

I have been testing my setup and can’t get it any smaller then 6Gb
system and 2Gb swap which can be shrunken to about 980Mb.
I have to say that this is a Ubuntu ‘Workstation’ install which means it
has X installed and probably a whole lot of apps and services which you
don’t need. I could find my way around a terminal only installation but
a lot of people can’t. So the questions is, is this size acceptable or
should I try to dump as much unneeded stuff as I see fit?

I did my install in ubuntu’s “server” mode. I can get a compressed disk
image of about 300 megs. (I’m running behind on getting the announcement
of the torrent site out due to some family stuff.) Of course, the
bugzilla VMWare image is about 50 megs. We’ve got a ways to go to keep
up with the Joneses :wink:

I finally managed to finish my work on this and have the ubuntu.7z to a
size of 380Mb. This expands to a VMWare image of 2.5Gb.
This includes:

  • Ubuntu installed in “server” mode
  • Apache-2.0.54 mod_perl-2.0.1 Perl-5.8.7
  • RT-3.4.5
  • OracleXE
  • Sendmail-8.13.4-3, configured rt(-comment) email alias
  • gcc and related packages.

I might install RTFM (svn) and AT to make it a complete package,
everything else can be done by the end user.

Joop

Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

16

I finally managed to finish my work on this and have the ubuntu.7z to a
size of 380Mb. This expands to a VMWare image of 2.5Gb.
This includes:

  • Ubuntu installed in “server” mode
  • Apache-2.0.54 mod_perl-2.0.1 Perl-5.8.7
  • RT-3.4.5
  • OracleXE
  • Sendmail-8.13.4-3, configured rt(-comment) email alias
  • gcc and related packages.

I might install RTFM (svn) and AT to make it a complete package,
everything else can be done by the end user.

Would it be difficult to modify this to use mysql or postgresql
on a different host? That is, if someone tries the virtual
machine and likes it, would they be able to point the database
connection at a non-virtual machine for better performance
and run it in production?

Les Mikesell
les@futuresourece.com

17

I finally managed to finish my work on this and have the ubuntu.7z to a
size of 380Mb. This expands to a VMWare image of 2.5Gb.
This includes:

  • Ubuntu installed in “server” mode
  • Apache-2.0.54 mod_perl-2.0.1 Perl-5.8.7
  • RT-3.4.5
  • OracleXE
  • Sendmail-8.13.4-3, configured rt(-comment) email alias
  • gcc and related packages.

I might install RTFM (svn) and AT to make it a complete package,
everything else can be done by the end user.

Would it be difficult to modify this to use mysql or postgresql
on a different host? That is, if someone tries the virtual
machine and likes it, would they be able to point the database
connection at a non-virtual machine for better performance
and run it in production?
Yes, with a bit of work this can be done. All the tools are available,
the VM is configured to use bridging and DHCP so it can connect to the
internet and download the neccessary components, they are not installed
because of space considerations and because I would
like to promote Oracle(XE) together with RT, backed by our business
</shameless plug off>.

In my testing I didn’t see much difference except ofcourse when you’re
database is on a signifcant faster machine which is exclusivly used for
RT and nothing else.
But then maybe one shouldn’t use virtualisation anyway and go for the
bare metal thing instead.
Nice thing about VM is that you can keep a working version zipped away
and restore it on any machine capable of running VMWare or other
compatible virtualisation software. If you have a solid backup/restore
procedure you should be up and running after a disaster in literally
minutes.
I could configure this VM, using OracleXE, to be redundant in a couple
of ways so that you would miss probably not one transaction in case of
disaster. Interested?:wink:

Joop
PS:
One thing I forgot to mention is that his VM has a patched SearchBuilder
which will use Oracle Text searching on ticket content, which means that
you don’t have to wait minutes for a search on ticket contents :wink:

Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

18

Is there a place to get this VM?From: rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com
[mailto:rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf Of Joop van
de Wege
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 1:59 PM
To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: Re: [rt-users] RT VMWare appliance

I finally managed to finish my work on this and have the ubuntu.7z
to a
size of 380Mb. This expands to a VMWare image of 2.5Gb.
This includes:

  • Ubuntu installed in “server” mode
  • Apache-2.0.54 mod_perl-2.0.1 Perl-5.8.7
  • RT-3.4.5
  • OracleXE
  • Sendmail-8.13.4-3, configured rt(-comment) email alias
  • gcc and related packages.

I might install RTFM (svn) and AT to make it a complete package,
everything else can be done by the end user.

Would it be difficult to modify this to use mysql or postgresql
on a different host? That is, if someone tries the virtual
machine and likes it, would they be able to point the database
connection at a non-virtual machine for better performance
and run it in production?
Yes, with a bit of work this can be done. All the tools are available,
the VM is configured to use bridging and DHCP so it can connect to the
internet and download the neccessary components, they are not installed
because of space considerations and because I would
like to promote Oracle(XE) together with RT, backed by our business
</shameless plug off>.

In my testing I didn’t see much difference except ofcourse when you’re
database is on a signifcant faster machine which is exclusivly used for
RT and nothing else.
But then maybe one shouldn’t use virtualisation anyway and go for the
bare metal thing instead.
Nice thing about VM is that you can keep a working version zipped away
and restore it on any machine capable of running VMWare or other
compatible virtualisation software. If you have a solid backup/restore
procedure you should be up and running after a disaster in literally
minutes.
I could configure this VM, using OracleXE, to be redundant in a couple
of ways so that you would miss probably not one transaction in case of
disaster. Interested?:wink:

Joop
PS:
One thing I forgot to mention is that his VM has a patched SearchBuilder
which will use Oracle Text searching on ticket content, which means that
you don’t have to wait minutes for a search on ticket contents :wink:

Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

http://lists.bestpractical.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

Community help: http://wiki.bestpractical.com
Commercial support: sales@bestpractical.com

Discover RT’s hidden secrets with RT Essentials from O’Reilly Media.
Buy a copy at http://rtbook.bestpractical.com

We’re hiring! Come hack Perl for Best Practical:

19

Would it be difficult to modify this to use mysql or postgresql
on a different host? That is, if someone tries the virtual
machine and likes it, would they be able to point the database
connection at a non-virtual machine for better performance
and run it in production?

Yes, with a bit of work this can be done. All the tools are available,
the VM is configured to use bridging and DHCP so it can connect to the
internet and download the neccessary components, they are not installed
because of space considerations and because I would
like to promote Oracle(XE) together with RT, backed by our business
</shameless plug off>.

In my testing I didn’t see much difference except ofcourse when you’re
database is on a signifcant faster machine which is exclusivly used for
RT and nothing else.
But then maybe one shouldn’t use virtualisation anyway and go for the
bare metal thing instead.
Nice thing about VM is that you can keep a working version zipped away
and restore it on any machine capable of running VMWare or other
compatible virtualisation software. If you have a solid backup/restore
procedure you should be up and running after a disaster in literally
minutes.
I could configure this VM, using OracleXE, to be redundant in a couple
of ways so that you would miss probably not one transaction in case of
disaster. Interested?:wink:

That sounds like a nice touch, but what I see as a real win is
the ability to have a stable database - and VM or not doesn’t
really matter there, we should already know how to maintain,
back up, and restore the database, but be able to update
the RT/RTFM/AT independently in a new VM image (preferably where
someone else has already done the work of bundling all the
perl modules). Then you would just give it the IP address
of the old one and change the configuration to use the old
database to cut over with only a few minutes of downtime.

Les Mikesell
les@futuresource.com

20

[snip]

Joop
PS:
One thing I forgot to mention is that his VM has a patched SearchBuilder
which will use Oracle Text searching on ticket content, which means that
you don’t have to wait minutes for a search on ticket contents :wink:

Could we integrate that patches into SB and may RT and don’t brake
backward compatibility of the SB? :slight_smile:

–
Joop van de Wege JoopvandeWege@mococo.nl

Best regards, Ruslan.