Sunday, September 27, 2009

OBM Barcamp

We spent friday afternoon & saturday on a barcamp dedicated to OBM with some co-workers from Paris.

At the end of the first afternoon, I was pretty dissapointed :
  • Lots of talking
  • No actions
My first impression was that I lost an afternoon of minig bugfixing. The second day changed my opinion.

Mehdi & Guillaume merged most of the patches we maintained for our main production setup.

Sylvain worked with Erwan to figure out the best way to make LemonLDAP + OBM + MiniG work out of the box.

David & Vincent did some improvements on 2.3 calendar.

Tony worked on obm-automation improvements to allow running update.pl at login time for auto-provisionning of mailboxes & ldap entries.

I worked with Michel & Guillaume to figure out how to handle really big mailboxes in MiniG. Michel mailbox is a 20GB one. To give you an idea, our cyrus setup in Toulouse is only 35GB for 44 mailboxes & lots of mailshares.

Michel's mailbox was a very interesting test-case. It triggered a "too many open files" pretty rapidly. We identified a very old bug : the class that read minig configuration files left a file descriptor open.

This jumbo mailbox has other properties : it is big enough to trigger bugs that only occured on Toulouse production setup after more than 24h. As we are still unsure if the deadlock timeout that occurs on some jdbc transactions is derby's fault or minig's fault, I just committed the switch from a derby internal database to an external PostgreSQL instance. This change will permit one thing: identify if the bug was in derby.

Some easier to fix bugs were also identified :
  • Advanced search misshandled searches on subject with two keywords
  • Tony helped me fix the filter that was used for autocomplete when ldapContacts.pl is active
Some decision were taken:
  • We confirmed that OBM feature & ui freeze will be effective on Oct 15th.
  • Contact search in OBM & MiniG will move from SQL queries to a SOLR core (we're not sure yet if it will meet the 2.3 freeze date). We will also try to do the same for events.
  • We are going to integrate a real LemonLDAP sso provider in minig. One that will not require OBM sso subsystem

If I consider the complete barcamp session, It was needed & productive.

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