Good news for me, bad news for everyone else, I have an amicable solution for handling bandwidth tracking on the new servers.  Instead of going the cumbersome method of writing an Apache module to track bandwidth, I will be taking a page from cPanel’s book and just writing traffic to a flat file.  Every night at approximately 3 AM a script will reconcile the bandwidth logs and dump it into the database.  There is a marginal hit on filesystem performance, but again this is a far better solution than Ensim’s cumbersome configuration file parsing, plus we will still be able to retain the rapid Web server restarts that we have all grown to appreciate and love.

Currently, the script to parse and dump the logs into the database is being written and should be live no later than Saturday morning.

IMAP/POP3 and SSH traffic are negligible.  Dedicated port traffic will be next on the list of problems to solve… possibly with some iptables packet counting.

- Matt

New version of esprit is live on the servers at this time…

• Added: WebDAV support
• Fixed: Inherit uid from directory in  File_Module::fix_apache_perms_backend
• Fixed: sub-delegated hostnames are skipped in DNS Manager (NS RR type)
• Fixed: rewrote how DNS records are added; since nsupdate won’t give us the nameserver’s error message, first add the record, check for existence, then if the change did not go through run the modified zone configuration through named-checkzone

• Added: Log Rotation page
• Fixed: factor in missed payments into next billing date in Account Overview
• Fixed: reset transaction count to 0 on credit card change
• Fixed: remove cross-join on mysql.db table as normal esprit user does not have sufficient privileges; stat /var/lib/mysql/ instead
• Changed: upgraded FCKeditor to 2.6b
• Changed: upgraded jQuery to 1.2.2

There will be one more esprit update before the Great Documentation Write of 2008 (and quota upgrades) that will feature an advanced editor for Log Rotate (essentially a plain-text editor) and DAV support.  Things changed since I last evaluated using DAV with the Directory container in Apache to permit the intermingling of the two.  This makes built-in DAV support quite feasible.

Minor release tonight to fix a regression error in compressed file handling within the File Manager.  Other changes since then have been packaged into tonight’s update:

• Fixed: regression error in compressed file handling in File Manager
• Fixed: warning message on Last Login for first login
• Changed: add waiting image for autocomplete boxes
• Changed: directories should include trailing forward slash for autocomplete boxes
• Changed: moved Web_Module::log* to Log_Module class

Although the next esprit update was featured to include a revised Log Rotation provision, it has been pushed back to the next update sometime this week to make way for rename support, because that feature has been requested far too often.

• Added: info state variable in frontpage configuration named path for multiple FrontPage paths (not yet implemented)
• Added: tablesorter helper to facilitate sorting with large tables; presently available in “Manage Mailboxes” and “DNS Manager”
• Added: rename support to “Manage Mailboxes”
• Fixed: change <IfDefine !PHP5> to <IfDefine !PHP4> in custom logs
• Fixed: translate HTML special characters when displaying error messages in browser
• Fixed: FCKeditor handles PHP code now
• Fixed: background transition on postback operations faded to white instead of rgb(230,230,220) in IE.  Change the CSS declaration from hex to rgb
• Fixed: automatically add DNS record for subdomain if it does not exist at creation
• Changed: set FCKeditor in Source mode initially
• Changed: rename Mail_Module::alias_exists to Mail_Module::address_exists

Now that we have a usable file management module in esprit things are coming together quite well.  Note that I’ll be temporarily postponing new features after “Log Rotation” and edit-in-place for e-mail addresses are implemented in the next update to concentrate on adding content to the wiki.  My goal is to have the “Resource Center” retired by mid-February; the sooner the better.

• Added: wget-like facility to File Manager, download and decompress archives on the fly
• Added: domain_fs_path/domain_info_path methods to HTML controller
• Fixed: recursive chown didn’t recursively chown
• Fixed: abort mailbox creation if uid isn’t present in uid table
• Fixed: rewrote file upload handling, which should handle larger files without puking unexpectedly due to memory limits (bug #38)
• Fixed: shifting rows in Quick Menu on IE6
• Changed: color layout of control panel
• Changed: replaced save as icon in File Manager
• Changed: increased single file upload limit from 4M to 64M
• Changed: Manage Users & Mailboxes -> Manage Users; Mailbox Routes -> Manage Mailboxes

One late addition to the party that I’m sure most people will appreciate.

•  Added: WYSIWYG FCKeditor to File Manager

Sorry about the last commit, which conveniently left the subdomain changes out

Changelog from Sunday’s work, which includes a couple of enhancements and miscellaneous fixes:

• Added: octal permission view to File Manager
• Fixed: ownership of parent directory following extraction leaves root:root ownership (bug #67)
• Fixed: file permission change results in “Invalid Directory” message
• Fixed: MySQL Manager, PostgreSQL Manager, phpMyAdmin, and phpPgAdmin password field types converted from text to password
• Fixed: return value on SQL_Module::edit_mysql_user() always returned false
• Changed: Increased Urchin profile allowance to 2 free profiles per account

Friday is a big day of changes.  New esprit update scheduled for 3 AM EST (-0500 GMT).  Changelog follows:

• Added: new subdomain facility, replaces Ensim version.  Includes global/local subdomains (see http://guide.apisnetworks.com/index.php/Apache)
• Added: SPF Wizard support for secondary domains
• Fixed: SPF records weren’t being saved on postback
• Fixed: is_int() check on File_Module::quota incorrectly handles octal values
• Fixed: kludge, force sticky bit on Majordomo configuration; calling chmod from another module drops the 0 which is significant if no special bits are set, e.g. 2755 is preserved while 0755 is converted to octal.  To fix at a later date once regression testing is implemented.
• Fixed: mysql_escape_string() warning in MySQL/PostgreSQL database backups
• Changed: renamed “Quota Tracker” to less ambiguous “Disk Usage Watcher”
• Changed: upgraded jQuery to 1.2.2
• Changed: increase color transition from 2.5 seconds to 3 seconds for cosmetic reasons
• Removed: clean-up of old JS no longer in use, prototype and scriptaculous

A few fixes have trickled in over the past two days in addition to the two listed below:

• Changed: Upgraded RubyGems to 1.0.1
• Fixed: revert File Manager “Upload” button that was previously missing (oversight, honest)

Older fixes from the last few days bundled into the blog post:

• Fixed: editing Majordomo configuration resulted in incorrect permissions/ownership combination (660, admin user/group)
• Fixed: next SQL backup date should use today as base instead of the next_date field

Folks, good news: I’m pushing the latest esprit update to the servers at this time.  In addition to the much wanted symlink support, there are several compression interface fixes, which means you should be able to extract an archive from your site.  Having said that, adding a wget component would likely be another beneficial addition in the near future.  After temporarily canning the one-click interface (it’s not coming back for a while) I can go back to concentrating on adding new features to the control panel and there’s a thread opened for user requests.  If you have a request, then post there or just reply to this news post.  Changelog follows.

• Added: postback status color fade
• Added: rename/symlink support in the File Manager
• Added: directory drop-down for extraction destination (still needs some work on responsiveness)
• Fixed: file names with spaces were not properly extracted via the Zip interface in the File Manager
• Fixed: code clean-up in generic AJAX handler library, File Manager
• Fixed: encode filenames in File Manager when used in URL
• Fixed: interface mismatch in File Manager’s compression handler
• Fixed: billing service connection errors were displayed
• Fixed: miscellaneous code clean-ups
• Removed: old debugging information from Module_Skeleton::synchronize_changes
• Changed: upgraded jQuery to 1.2.1
• Changed: upgraded esprit backend to PHP 5.2.5