Work After Work

I’m wondering whether its a good thing that I’m still thinking about work after work. I did no Fresco work today as a result of that. Also talked extensively to Erik. Good to keep in touch. Interesting conversation. Learnt that he’s looking into QNX. Interesting how the oddest things turn up again. At any rate very interested in a problem at work. Unfortunately, I think my solution will take a lot of effort to get right. I don’t think I have the time to do it – although I certainly intend to try. At any rate – we’ll start off by saying that I am unhappy with how the systems are set up and administed. This is _not_ the fault of any of the people involved. At the time the decision was made, the setup was the best that could be done. However, I think we should now be considering something better. What brought this up? Two things actually… First, I was talking to my co-workers about how we needed to create a bug tracking system. A lot of our bugs are documented via word of mouth, email or source code/class documentation. A bug tracking system would be a big step forward. Also, I would like to create a Plone type website and Wiki, where people can add information. This would be very useful and would enable people to add tips like “How to setup a RH 8.0 system for XXXX” or “What configuration files need to be edited to get this working” or “My program is doing X – how can it be fixed”. Unfortunately I started thinking of a problem – no one wants to set up their user account multiple times. You have to do it for the Linux boxen and then an account for the Roundup tracker and on top of that an account for Plone wiki? It would collapse due to the sheer ungainliness of that scheme. That’s when I started to look at LDAP. I think LDAP could be the answer to a lot of my problems. If I create a global LDAP server I can use that to provide authentication services for Linux clients (this is my understanding). I can also _definitely_ use it as the user backend for a Plone based site. I know for sure that Subversion works with LDAP (that would be nice – coupled with SSL we get secure checkin/checkouts. The only thing I don’t know is how to get roundup working with LDAP – but I’m sure it can be done. Oh man – I can see this in my mind. I need to sketch out this idea – what content needs to be in the database, how the system has to be setup. What is required etc etc and then see if I can implement a server with all this functionality and two test clients. Hopefully I have the _time_ to do this in.