Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

I’ve just added an ebuild for activeCollab to the Gentoo Web-Apps overlay, in the experimental branch.

activeCollab is shaping up to be an open-source alternative to 37 Signals’ Basecamp, written in PHP instead of Rails.

Enjoy!

I’ve agreed to take on the job of building the ebuilds for Drupal 4.7 for the Gentoo web-apps team.

One of the nice features of Drupal 4.7 is that each of the nearly 200 optional modules comes with its own installation script. In theory, this will make it possible for Gentoo to provide a separate ebuild for each module, allowing site owners to mix and match modules to suit their individual needs.

Hopefully, I’ll get some experimental ebuilds into the webapps overlay shortly.

We have the first of our new monthly Gentoo web-apps project meetings tomorrow night, at 19:00 UTC in #gentoo-web on irc.freenode.net. I’ve put the agenda up on the wiki.

If there’s anything important that needs adding to the agenda, please let me know before the meeting.

Unless the spammers have also been enjoying a break from things over the holiday period, the collection of anti-spam additions for b2evolution that I recently put together has been doing a great job. I’ve only had one spammer get through so far - a definite improvement over recent times

I’ve put together a first release of the antispam patch collection. None of this code is my original work; I’ve just collected these patches from the b2evolution forums and made them available in one, easy-to-apply patch. Full credit for the original authors is included in the README file in the tarball.

Once I’ve caught up with Daniel (who maintains Gentoo’s b2evolution package), I hope to get this patch included as standard on Gentoo. I’d rather resist making this optional; I’m sure everyone using b2evo to run their blog (like all the Gentoo-hosted dev blogs) should have stronger antispam as standard.

I think that there’s still room for improvement. So far, I haven’t seen b2evolution itself do anything with the IP addresses that spam comes from. Blacklisting the IP addresses locally, and submitting them to a central blacklist like bsb.empty.us could be useful. Then, updating the spam recheck, deny access for referer spammers and bad behaviour add-ins to also update the IP blacklists could be very useful The zombie boxes relaying the spam all seem to post a wide range of spam; being able to identify and block them as early as possible may cut down on the spam that does get through.

Now, if only we could actually do something useful about all these zombie boxes that the spam is relayed through …

I’m not happy with b2evolution’s out-of-the-box anti-spam protection. Too much spam gets through, and I end up wasting time on cleaning it off my site when I could be working on Gentoo instead.

I’ve hardened my local copy of b2evolution with the following hacks and plugins:

• CAPTCHA support on images, from village-idiot.org.
• IP-blacklist filtering, from kwa.
• Mass spam rechecking, originally from Isaac Schleuter (and integrated into b2evo by me)
• Deny access to all pages for referer spammers, also by Isaac Schleuter
• Bad Behaviour support, also from kwa

I have also added a hack to support Technorati tags.

I’ll see how well these additions do over the next few days, and if there’s any interest, I’ll add them to Gentoo’s b2evolution ebuild.

I’ve bumped our package for Coppermine up to version 1.4.3. This version contains security fixes; if you’re running Coppermine, you’re encouraged to upgrade asap.

I’ve just added another bugfix release of webapp-config to Portage, courtesy of Gunnar Wrobel and Renat Lumpau. This release contains fixes for issues on BSD, and for the upgrade feature.

If you find webapp-config useful, and are enjoying the major performance and reliability improvements from the Python port, please check out Gunnar’s wish list and Renat’s wish list

webapp-config 1.50.2 was released last night. It contains fixes for a few bugs that have been reported in the Python port.

As things stand, I plan on unmasking this at the weekend. The sooner we can move away from the older, slower, buggier bash version the better as far as I am concerned.

I’ve committed webapp-config v1.50 to the Portage tree. Testers sought!

phpgroupware seems to be a project that, if not dead, is certainly on life support.

Their main homepage has gone - even Google doesn’t have the page cached any more. SourceForce says that the project has migrated to Savannah, but the last release via Savannah was last year, and this year’s security releases have been through SourceForge.

I’ve masked the package, and will get around to dropping it completely after a suitable period of reflection.