etherpad

Etherpad email fails with javax.mail.MessagingException: 501 Syntax: HELO hostname

Posted on October 3, 2010 by John McLear

Output from bin/run.sh &

Try to register for a pro account and you get

javax.mail.MessagingException: 501 Syntax: HELO hostname

at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.issueCommand(SMTPTransport.java:1363)
at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.helo(SMTPTransport.java:838)
at com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPTransport.protocolConnect(SMTPTransport.java:375)
at javax.mail.Service.connect(Service.java:275)
at javax.mail.Service.connect(Service.java:156)

Cause: Hostname isn’t in /etc/hosts

Solution:

hostname

Copy hostname value and paste to /etc/hosts

A week in the life..

Posted on September 19, 2010September 19, 2010 by John McLear

I haven’t been very vocal lately, because I have been busy…

Satpin

I have been working on Ian Addisons new project now called Satpin (something to do with phonics according to Miss Pitkethly). My Javascript skills have improved massively doing this project which I have enjoyed thoroughly. Javascript is awesome. I need a decent tutor though, I am cobbling my way through stuff using “John” logic which isn’t good enough. Once the project is complete/stable I will be releasing it open source (it will require a LAMP stack). I am spending masses of attention to detail on this project, more than I have ever done. I’m focusing 99% of my efforts on UI. I decided to make it writeable by anyone which will upset some people but oh well..

Wind power

I have been finishing the electrics on my wind turbine, which is now up and running (hopefully okay). It’s been a while since I did any component level work and Sparky helped me which was good.

Apache load balancing

We spent a few hours working on how to improve load balancing on our main apache cluster. We are considering casandra if we grow any quicker than our current projections.

Shib constipation

Mid week I struggled and I’m still struggling massively with a Shib SP deployment. I’m running the same config as another deployment but I am getting errors. Think this is a job for team john and tom to get sorted properly. We are doing it so we can work with the Swedish equivalent of JISC for their Etherpad deployment.

Classdroid

We got classdroid working properly, well, sort of. Turns out Android isn’t as cool as I first thought. Well, android is.. Turns out motorola/lg etc. are idiots and install custom software including custom camera intents that breaks a lot of the phones functionality. Thankfully google will fix this with any v2+ updates. The LG Optimus is due V2.1 this month so I am willing to wait a few weeks instead of trying to squash a documented/fixed bug.

PHP

I helped Challenge CLC with a touch of PHP this week, super easy stuff. It is always good to collaborate with people, especially when I am so comfortable helping out in PHP.

I did a few more edu installs of Etherpad, nothing exciting here. Wrote a new way to integrate with the scribblar API. Stefan has the code if anyone wants it. Important thing to note, why the Hell are so many Americans and now Africans getting me in to do Etherpad deployments yet there are so few EU deployments going on? Is their something about Europeans and our lack of encouraging collaboration in the work/edu place?

Finally. Happy Pirates day! Now gimme your loot.

Etherpad – cp: missing destination file operand after `lib/’

Posted on August 24, 2010August 24, 2010 by John McLear

This error is caused by the MYSQL_CONNECTOR_JAR environment variable/export not being set.

Set it by typing..

export MYSQL_CONNECTOR_JAR="path to your mysql connector.jar"

Making Etherpad content indexable by Search Engines

Posted on August 22, 2010August 22, 2010 by John McLear

Etherpad contents very rarely shows up on Search results. But with forums and wikis moving over to it I wanted to find a way to give etherpad a bit of an SEO edge..

Firstly I looked at the twitterstyletags plugin which creates an rss feed or all pads.. This is a perfect solution for a sitemap so that’s that box ticked 🙂

Next I knew that Etherpad served pad contents in an iframe so I looked at better ways to get content for search engines to index. Etherpad includes Read only versions of each pad, these read only versions push the content to the user without displaying it in an iframe so it is a perfect fix for the problem.

My final step will be to find someone to modify the twitterstyletags plugin RSS feed to create a sitemap.xml and to create a plugin that allows users to easily link back from read only versions to currently active pads.

fsc Could not connect to compilation daemon in CentOS

Posted on August 20, 2010August 23, 2010 by primaryt

Trying to install etherpad on CentOS and I ran into the fsc issue. Scalac throws a load of errors during compile so that’s a non starter. Interestingly enough even if you change fsc to scalac in comp.sh you still get fsc errors. Even overwriting the fsc binary w/ the scalac binary throws errors..

scala version: 2.8.0 (installed from tar) also tested 2.7.7

Error output:

# fsc -verbose
[Server arguments: -d /usr/share/etherpad/. -verbose]
[VM arguments: ]
[Temp directory: /tmp/scala-devel/root]
[Executed command: List(/usr/local/scala/scala-2.8.0.final/bin/scala, scala.tools.nsc.CompileServer)]
[Port number: -1]
Could not connect to compilation daemon.

selinux is disabled:

# /usr/sbin/sestatus
SELinux status:                 disabled

Paths set as:

# export | grep SCALA
declare -x SCALA="/usr/local/scala/scala-2.8.0.final/bin/scala"
declare -x SCALA_HOME="/usr/local/scala/scala-2.8.0.final"
declare -x SCALA_LIBRARY_JAR="/usr/local/scala/default/lib/scala-library.jar"

/etc/hosts is correct, we can ping localhost:

# ping localhost
PING localhost (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.047 ms

Tried fsc -reset to no avail:

# fsc -reset
Could not connect to compilation daemon.

Anyone any other suggestions?

Note: I was able to get it to compile the .jar file after a hell of a lot of tweeking and playing around w/ scala_home etc. However fsc still fails/failed. Spent quite a lot of hours on this, would be nice to get a resolution to the fsc issue.

Note: Last time I helped someone with this it was due to the VPS (don’t try to install Etherpad on a VPS) didn’t provide swap space so erm, yeah.. Of course scala and fsc didn’t work properly.. I isolated this by doing

scala -verbose >> logfile.log 2>&1

The error I got was this one which is commonly related to VPS’…