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

New esprit release posted just now with the following changes:

• Added: configurable per-account Urchin profile allowance
• Fixed: new MySQL build renames RPMs to MySQL-*-community
• Fixed: last login incorrectly displayed with new accounts
• Fixed: unable to remove custom logs
• Changed: upgraded RubyGems to 0.9.5
• Changed: upgraded Ruby to 1.8.6-p111

Two more updates that came in today through tickets…

• Fixed: Urchin low-level driver no longer handled -1 exit code correctly.  Caused by removing sig child handler from PHP.
• Fixed: don’t check whether the database exists when attempting to remove a database backup task.  Dropping a database implicitly deletes the backup task, if set.

• DNS Manager no longer transposes MX records whose hostname begins with numbers.
• SOAP became broken during a periodic esprit update last week.  SSL support was missing from the new control panel build.
• Mailbox Routes no longer pull from deprecated flat-file source; domains for newer accounts should appear in Mailbox Routes now

esprit update is scheduled for tonight with a few minor fixes and enhancements.  This update is primarily to address people who setup Gmail and flip the MX records around.

• Fixed: rewrite synchronize changes; invoke EditVirtDomain directly with the service arguments

• Fixed: flip priority/hostname for MX records to fix confusion with Hosted Gmail

• Fixed: reflective backend calls in Module_Skeleton::query

• Added: user password change support for sub-users

As always, I’ve taken it upon myself to pack in too many updates for the next esprit release. Aside from the Joomla one-click driver update and basic symlink support, here’s a listing of other notable changes sitting on the development server pending completion:

• Symlink target autocompletion
• Portable/non-portable symlink warnings; non-portable are unable to be read by Apache (e.g. ln /var/www/html/ foo)
• Multiple file upload
• Further conversion of File Manager’s jumbled JavaScript to lightweight (comparatively speaking of course) jQuery methods
• WordPress 2.2.3 update
• File rename support

As you probably know from experience, I am terrible when it comes to providing ETAs of releases. I will arbitrarily say the next release is due out “soon”. New symlink support lays the foundation of moving the subdomain management from Ensim to esprit. Likely you’ll see that afterwards, but in the meanwhile don’t forget that you can assign subdomains from the shell.

Due to popular demand (and likely collusion) I bring you the first ever blog update on server and esprit changes.

1) An esprit update is scheduled for tonight with three fixes and one update:

• Majordomo parsing errors on older configuration files generated before the server migration back in February.  These would have been created through Ensim’s Majordomo facility.
• MySQL backups were not backing up databases with \_ in the name.  \ is used to escape wildcards in the database name.
• Urchin disk usage was not reported in Disk Usage Breakdown
• jQuery updated to 1.1.4

2) Further, the mailbox routes backup policy has been augmented to take into account a weekly and monthly backup snapshot of e-mail mappings.  Information listed in “Mailbox Routes” is used by Postfix for mail delivery.  If an e-mail address isn’t listed in that page or it’s disabled (italicized gray text), then Postfix won’t deliver to that address.  Weekly and monthly snapshots were added as an extra safeguard just in case.

3) Backups were run over the weekend to get a feel for the new system.  /home/, /etc/, /usr/local/, and /var/ (excluding /var/lib/majordomo/OLDLOGS/ and /var/log/httpd/) are scheduled for backups.  From initial test runs the system takes about 1 hour to process each server.  Backups are going over the same switch that the Internet subnet is on, so I may need to bring in another switch and utilize the secondary NIC on each server.  Backup bandwidth is capped at 75 Mbps, which is adequate padding for anything going outbound to the Internet.

I’ll leave you folks with that update for the night, because it’s late for me.