Good-bye CMS Made Simple Hello WordPress
As a long time CMS Made Simple user I’m sad to report that it’s time for me to move on and standardize on WordPress.
Years ago when WordPress was just viewed as a just a blogging platform I decided to standardize on using CMS Made Simple. It was a good move and still is a great tool for the following reasons:
- Actively developed
- Community support
- Smarty template engine support
- Straight forward design
- Easy to use
- Templates
If you haven’t at least heard about the project it’s worth the time to checkout all of the features.
Despite the good memories with CMS Made Simple I’ve decided that I’ve got to cut back on my repertoire and standardize on WordPress and Drupal.
Nobody likes to admit their site is using a template but I’m thinking of upgrading to the UBlog WordPress Theme. More to follow…
Bookmark – Useful Online Text Conversion Tools
These are two useful sites that I found useful for converting text between different formats. My thanks to each of the site authors!
Converting XML Escaped Text
To convert text with XML escaped characters such as > or ĵ this tool at Freeformatter.com came in handy.
Convert Serialized PHP Strings
The PHP Online Unserializer was useful to quickly convert PHP serialized strings into readable text.
Installing Sealion on Centos 5 – Python Dependency
Overview
This is a short guide containing the steps I took to install Sealion on an older Centos 5 server. Sealion is a activity monitoring service website that reports the status of your linux every 5 minutes. An agent running on your server runs a set of common commands (i.e. ps, top, vmstat, …) and reports the results back to the sealion.com site web console where you can view the results. The Sealion introduction video says it all.
Installation Problems
The normal agent installation is usually a one line command but it failed on my server with this python dependency error:
Performing dependency check…
Error: Python dependency check failed
File “../bin/check_dependency.py”, line 19
except Exception as e:
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
The Sealion site didn’t list the dependencies and there weren’t any support documents that I could find. I emailed Sealion and they replied with a link to this article for installing Python 2.7 on RedHat or SUSE.
Installing Python 2.7 got me one step closer but failed during the make process for the sqlite module with the following error:
In function ‘_pysqlite_set_result’: error: ‘sqlite3_int64’ undeclared
After some searching this article came up listing the error as a known bug in Python 2.7.3. I repeated the Python installation with 2.7.8 and substituted the correct Pthyon version into the agent installation curl command and all worked.
Complete Procedure
- wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.8/Python-2.7.8.tgz
- tar -xvf Python-2.7.8.tgz
- cd Python-2.7.8
- ./configure
- make
- make install
- curl -s https://agent.sealion.com | sudo bash /dev/stdin -o YOURSEALIONKEY -p /usr/local/bin/python2 Tip: The -p parameter specifies which version of python to use. Substitute /usr/local/bin/python2 with the location your make install command placed Python and YOURSEALIONKEY with the user key obtained from the Sealion add server screen.
Note: As part of the troubleshooting process I updated sqlite but I’m not certain this was required. If you have problems try:
yum install sqlite.i386 sqlite-devel.i386
This installed and started the Sealion agent and after a few minutes server and server data appeared in my Sealion.com console.
Thoughts About Sealion
This is my first attempt at evaluating the Sealion linux server monitoring service. Other servers more up-to-date distributes installed the agent without issue.
The Sealion site is beautiful, functional, but a little sparse on content. There are only sporadic references to it across the internet (as of the time of writing) when I went searching for installation assistance. The lack of community activity leaves me a little worried about the reputation of Sealion but I can’t deny that the service is useful and easy to use. Their support email address responded quickly when I finally submitted my issue.
The service meets a need and has value to me. I hope to see it’s reputation increases and turn into a reasonably priced service.
Revision: 2014-07-04 Minor correction thanks to feedback from Team Sealion.
Microsoft Takes No-IP Down
As an occasional user of No-IP it shocked and outraged me to see Microsoft using court action to circumvent the services of another company without first pursuing the matter through non-legal channels. As a network administrator I understand the reasoning behind Microsoft’s actions but according to No-IP it was forcefully done without warning. Slashdot has some interesting comments explaining the legality of the action but the general sentiment is against Microsoft.
While everyone is so focused on the consolidation of computing resources in the cloud I think this should be a reminder of what one (perhaps misplaced) court action can do to an entire company and section of the internet community.
NetBeans 8 Navigator Empty or Blank When viewing Drupal PHP Files
It was exciting to see NetBeans 8 released as I use it as my primary editor for PHP projects (along with Xdebug of course) but the excitement was short lived when the navigator window frame was empty for all of my Drupal project files. After a bit of googling and checking the NetBeans bug tracker I wasn’t getting anywhere until I tried one last ditch generic search on Google which held the answer.
According to this blog posting it was discovered that the .install and .module files lose their content type and aren’t parsed as PHP files. A simple configuration change to set the correct content type fixes the issue. Wonderful!