Lukas' kleine Kaffee-Welt

Being an admin and doing things right:

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:38:56 +0200

FAIL.

GnuPG frustration

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:14:45 +0200

Now I know why secure encryption hasn't made it into the daily use of the masses yet. When it isn't even possible to do simple things for developers, how are developers supposed to make it easy for users?
Yeah, crypto is hard'n'stuff and I'm no crypto expert at all. But heck, there should be a working way for generating keys, encrypting, decrypting and signing messages using non standard homedirectories with python and gpg.

GnuPGInterface.py: yeah, like wrapping shell commands in objects help. FAIL.
python-pyme: FAIL. It barks loudly when I try to do anything else than what's in the examples.
GPG.py: FAIL. http 404? c'mon.

Gah. I need easier crypto.

Rewrite of the mokeladmin management tool

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:01:46 +0200

This might be shocking, but this post is actually not about coffee.

It's been a long time in the making, and it's still far from finished, but much of the work to get a first release is now done. Amazing that this little project is already two years old and has already undergone the odd rewrite.

What am I talking about you might ask? Right. The mokeladmin. Currently, it's an application to manage mail accounts (smtp/imap/pop3), aliases/forwards and xmpp/jabber accounts. It has a web frontend for admins, written with the incredible django framework.
The basic features currently implemented are:

one account for everything: smtp/imap/pop3/xmpp
per-account settings for smtp/imap/pop3/xmpp
flexible layout of the users' maildirs
migration script for the old version of this (yeah, like anybody but me cares)
doesn't require postfix to store all mail under the same UID/GID
features an ejabberd extauth authentication script
no backend servers need database access; all they see are files
generation of all the necessary maps

And probably many things I've forgotten.

The minimum requirements are a sane admin who knows what he/she's doing. Seriously. We support postfix and dovecot and ejabberd. Definitely planned for the near future are:

handling of multiple different backend (postfix or dovecot or ejabberd) servers
communication (for map exchange) between that servers per http, but gpg secured (yeah, this is a big one)
an interface for the joe user to manage his/her accounts
adding support for tinydns, including generating all kind of SRV and other records
reactivating support for powerdns. It's there in the tree, but doesn't really work and I havend worked in in ages, the code is from an old version

Why am I making this public? Well, currently, it only runs on one server (this), but it needs more work and it has potential. I just wanted to have this out of the bzr repository into the public. If you, dear reader, really want to try it out, the code lives in the bzr branch

http://lukas.einfachkaffee.de/bzr/mokeladmin-rewrite/

which you can checkout with

bzr branch http://lukas.einfachkaffee.de/bzr/mokeladmin-rewrite/ mokeladmin

if you happen to have a recent version of bzr installed. Yeah, the little documentation that's there is out of date (you guess).
Setting up the web frontend is the easy part (go over to the django tutorial for info on that), wiring everything with the respective server software is the hard part and needs to be done quite manually and is the main reason why this requires an admin and is completely uninteresting for anybody else (I think). Oh and you need the newforms-admin-branch of django, which will eventually get merged to the main developement branch which will eventually result in a 1.0 version near the end of this year.
If you like python and what we've written here so far, feel free to contact me (or send patches). I especially welcome input on that gpg-encrypted-maps-over-http-part.

Thanks Jan for writing the powerdns part, we will get that working again eventually.
Thanks to jcs for the hours of SQL-juggling with the old version and the help with rewrite and the web fronted.
Thanks to Ingo for the visual inspirations!

Life update

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:55:01 +0200

A short list of coffee-things I've been up to lately:

new tampers

new (old) grinders

new (odd) portafilter

new t-shirt

new (BIG) machine

not for me this year

A good day for freedom in germany

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:33:01 +0100

Today, the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundersverfassungsgericht), the highest court in germany, decided in an express resolution that the lawsuit of more than 34000 (that's thirty-four thousand!) people against the federal republic's gouvernment that the six month data retention law (all connections to the internet; all email (sender, subject, recipients, date); all mobile communication (caller, location, callee, date, duration) and others) is in parts against our constitution. I'm quite happy, though not satisfied - the data retention itself is still legal, just the access to the data is permitted only when a severe crime can be attested.

A proper trial will not be held before the end of the year, so a final decision is far away.
See also (german only):

Spiegel Online

Tagesschau

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

At least, one good day for freedom in these times.