Lukas' kleine Kaffee-Welt

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 Yeah, the little documentation that's there is out of date (you guess).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!

New Developments

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:17:56 +0100

For one, it's "bzr branch http://lukas.einfachkaffee.de/bzr/mokeladmin-rewrite/" - an afford to rewrite our mail(/dns) management platform by mostly Jan-Christoph and I. And then, I'm now famous. Don't believe it? Have a look here (at the bottom, under 'Aficionados'). Thanks for linking, jr! And then, there's a new Münster-based coffee startup called sonntagmorgen (sunday morning), that let's you blend your own blends online. I'll visit them this week and see what their coffee is like and what they do. And then, there's roasterBase, a coffee roasting profile database (sort of), that soon might get a web two dot zero beta social community component to it. And then, there's life, that's in between everything. And then, good night!

And then, in an update, there's a list of blogs that I read and might update every now and then. Suggestions welcome.

Zugangsdaten

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 01:49:00 +0200

Oh, was ich noch erwähnen wollte:

Einer der Gründe, warum ich so lange nichts hab von mir hören lassen, war, dass ich die Zugangsdaten für mein altes Blog verpeilt habe. Und überhaupt keinen Nerv hatte, mich irgendwie mit Datenbanken, Serendipity und/oder PHP auseinanderzusetzen, so dass ich einfach nichts schreiben konnte. Und ich hätte wirklich gewollt, zum Beispiel über die westdeutschen Ausscheidungen der deutschen Baristameisterschaften in Dortmund, oder das finale derselben in Köln. Oder den Kaffee im Coffee-Store und den Kaffee im Edwards, oder diese verrückten Menschen, die man auf toomuchcoffee.com findet.

Wie gut, dass mich das alles irgendwann so sehr genervt hat, dass ich mir jetzt ein neues kleines schickes Blog mit Hilfe von django gebaut und diesen ganzen PHP-Kram einfach weggeworfen habe.

Hello TMC

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 04:08:00 +0200

So, this is my first real post to my new blog. I'll see if I manage to import the entries from the old blog, but this will take a while, though. This blog will be more specialized on coffee, less on personal things - so expect ramblings about beans, machines and other barista stuff here!

Jeschke actually made a very beautiful logo for this site a few months ago, but I just now happen to have a camera to get a picture.

This blog is built with Django, which you obviously can see on the right, and is a work in progress. The code of it can be checked out with subversion or browsed online at einfachkaffee.de/svn/einfachkaffee.de/site/.