After making multiple UI changes to Manage Mailboxes, it became more and more clear to me that esprit needs a design overhaul.  The existing control panel cannot architecturally and aesthetically support the level of complexity necessary to facilitate modal edit boxes and AJAX callbacks, two critical components of the new interface.  Having said that, I have forked the main trunk in the esprit repository and started on the important design changes.

I am sure many of you have noticed the tiny design changes, which was my first intention: to gradually, piece-by-piece, promote esprit 0.99 to 1.0 while working on other features.  Unfortunately it appears to be more evident with each passing keystroke that we are at the crossroads of design.  Either I can continue with nasty patchwork or rebuild the infrastructure to allow greater flexibility and control over the page presentation in esprit.  The downside to a redesign is that esprit won’t be changing for a minimum of 2 weeks, but the upside to all of this chaos is that we will have something easier to support, easier to manage, and most importantly, easier to add value.

So that’s that; back to work.

- Matt

2:58 PM EDT Update: Here is the revised login portal:

A service window has been scheduled for all of the servers to perform a routine upgrade of MySQL and Dovecot on Saturday, August 16th at 12:00 AM EDT (-0400 GMT). During this time git will also be rolled out on all servers with Basic or higher package. This window is expected to last approximately 30 minutes at most.
MySQL will be upgraded from 5.0.51b to 5.0.67 and Dovecot from 1.0 to 1.1.2

Update: 11:09 PM — There are some outstanding incompatibilities with Dovecot 1.1.2 and our custom PAM drivers. This will be re-evaluated at another date (possibly next week) with the added possibility of Solr or Lucene full-text searching. Just MySQL and git will be upgraded tonight.

Update: 11:50 PM — Upgrades are finished. All servers experienced a brief 10 - 20 second outage during shutdown/startup of MySQL. Rails applications running as FastCGI were reloaded following the upgrade. There have been issues in the past where the Rails app will continue to reference the MySQL socket referenced at start-up. During a MySQL server restart, the filesystem location of this socket changes, so the Rails app continues to reference the now-defunct socket. If you experience this issue just send a hang-up signal to the Rails process. Mount procfs under “Language Options”, then run kill -HUP $(ps -C dispatch.fcgi -o pid=)

Who wants to take a stab at a shorter command? Perl junkies apply.

A new esprit update has been pushed to the servers at this time.  Primarily a bug release, there is one new feature: an upload progress meter within the File Manager providing completion percentage, speed, and time remaining.  The revised Manage Mailboxes isn’t ready to go yet, as there are still several features still to add.  An interim release that reformats the data has been published, but by no means is this indicative of the final revision.

• Added: follow referring page after logging in if page access resulted in login screen
• Added: cleanup stale tickets after 1 month
• Added: upload progress meter to file uploads in File Manager
• Fixed: non-atomic DNS record modifications resulted in deletion if the previous record conditions failed
• Fixed: sourcing shell_functions.sh from directories outside esprit home didn’t follow paths correctly
• Fixed: Credentials div in login portal formatted incorrectly in IE
• Fixed: Logout link missing leading slash (”/login.php”)
• Fixed: bandwidth rollover on any site that has exceeded its rollover date instead of day of (Ensim fix)
• Fixed: broken symlinks are not removed with recursion enabled in File_Manager::delete
• Fixed: bail on Billing::get_package_type if esprit cannot find a suitable billing server
• Fixed: PNG transparency issues in first-time nag screen under IE6
• Fixed: multiple Quick Menu display issues in IE6
• Changed: Flip “Insecure” and “Logout” in top nav bar
• Changed: abbreviate long DNS hostname and parameter values in DNS Manager
• Changed: abbreviate long filenames in File Manager
• Changed: skin updates for appliance administrator
• Changed: promote Sputnik to domain checker server
• Removed: don’t dump context on production servers in the event of a fatal error, use 500 ISE

Credit card updates, recurring transactions, suspensions, and subscription renewals will be inaccessible through Thursday afternoon. The billing server responsible for write-only transactions is housed outside the data center on an external line within the office. Sometime during Tuesday evening the line was severed by presumably a backhoe operator. Historical transactions, existing billing status, and any read-only billing operations will continue to operate without interruption as those are pulled from a slave server housed in another data center.

Consequently, the next esprit update will occur on Thursday night barring any further extraordinary events.

- Matt

Two changes have been pushed to the servers at this time.

1. The first set of changes are in response to a configuration problem on Aleph early this morning that temporarily resulted in Web server being inaccessible:
   • The first is a set of changes designed to allow graceful recovery of the Web server on stale configuration. If the server is found to be down, then a rapid restart is issued, followed by a configuration check and optional rebuild if the configuration is found to be out-of-date.
   • Secondly, a dirty state has been added to the Apache configuration following removal of an account. Configuration rebuilds are skipped after a site is removed as removal generally occurs in batches. Failure to rebuild the configuration after removal results in a non-recoverable error. Garbage collection is scheduled 30 minutes after removal of a site to ensure that the dirty state is removed by rebuilding the configuration files.
2. Control panel redirects will use HTTP (http://) instead of HTTPS (https://). Firefox 3 and IE7 have made self-signed certificates much more confusing to accept. You may switch to HTTPS by clicking on the “Non-SSL Connection” link on the login portal or “Insecure Connection” in the top bar after logging into the control panel.

After a month of arduous work, the new order system is a go.  Several changes were made with the billing system to accommodate for automatic account setups, including immediate PayPal logging.  All payments made through PayPal should be posted as they come in and cancellations will be updated nightly now.

With that being taken care of, I will be returning to work on esprit on Wednesday after a much needed 24 hours of rest.  I will be working on making things a little less cumbersome (Manage Mailboxes, I’m looking at you).

- Matt