HP t610 Thin Client R&D Project

I haven't talked about desktop hardware for a good while.  Years ago we bought several hundred HP t5725 workstations.  They're still production and working great, and are projected to run their full 10 year duty cycle.  HP replaced the t5725 with the t5745 model which offered better performance and 1Gb networking.  We have purchased around 50 of the t5745s and given them to users that need faster performance; such as those that use Google Earth and large PDF files.  They too should provide a 10 year duty cycle.

In recent months the t5745 was discontinued and replaced with the t610.  Specs are here.   In short, it's an AMD Dual-Core T56N APU with Radeon HD 6320 Graphics 1.65 GHz running the Ubuntu operating system.  We purchased one device for around $400 dollars.  My first inclination of course was to open it up and look under the hood.  Pictures and comments are below.

In the coming weeks, I'm going to install our custom modifications into the base OS and get it working the same as the earlier models.

I've spoken about thin clients many times, but wanted to mention again how incredibly cost effective and stable they are to run for enterprise use.  A small City of 10 employees would not reap benefits, but as you get into the hundreds of users, the savings are clear.  We have about 560 of them deployed around various City buildings.  $400 purchase price with a 10 year duty cycle yields $40 per year (hardware only) desktop costs.  When one of them dies, the users have nothing saved locally and our support group just walks down and replaces the hardware.  The user is back up again in just a few minutes with no loss of productivity.

Here is the inside of the t610, the heat from the CPU is moved away with copper and vents.  No moving parts, no fans.  The blue module in the upper left hand corner is the flash "hard drive".  These can be 1GB or 2GB and are cheap and easily upgraded.

Lots of ports on the front, nice design.

More ports and some legacy connections on the back.  All of our hardware should connect and work.

The entire case has no screws and pops apart with just clips. Here it is back together.

Lots Of Updates

I just noticed again that it's been a while since my last blog.  Things have been busy at always, some of my projects lately were not so conductive to screenshots and technical thoughts. But a few things might be of interest.

SuseCon 2013

First up I got permission and funding to attend SuseCon in Orlando this fall.  It's always nice to meet people and have hallway conversations.  Find me and say Hi if you'd like to converse.  The conference last year was very productive!

Alfresco Testing & Analysis

I have been working with the IT Director on testing and exploring ways to deploy Alfresco, and content management in general.  Historically we have always had silos of data that were not highly shared, and it's our hope that we can move in another direction with this software.  We have been exploring ideas on the best way to build the top level Sites and then how content should be stored.  If several departments are working on a City project, our information should be shared without duplication of effort and documents.  We're making some headway on ideas and believe that we have built the best possible top level structure.  We are also considering the staffing requirements of this type of deployment and impact to other City departments.  Lots of testing and R&D ahead on this project.  The software itself and mobile devices are working great.

Support Portal, Additional Logging

We have not been able to add additional staff for a while, so I have been trying to get more and more data that is logged to flat files on our servers into the hands of our support staff.  This allows all of IT to see issues that normally would have meant checking the various files manually and understanding how to scan through logs.   The screens are rough, but working and are allowing us to be very proactive on seeing problems.  The blue area shows users logging in and out of the servers.  The purple area is showing us users that have logged in the most often in the last few days.  Usually they are not having problems, but sometimes this indicates someone that is struggling with errant hardware or network connections.  Remember, that very often end users will never call for help and will continue to struggle.  Seeing this information allows us to call them and offer help.  The dark green section is showing users that logged in multiple times without first logging off.  This sometimes means they have simply powered off their workstations, or are losing power and have a bad UPS.  The red section shows users logging into NX from the Internet.  The light green section shows users that had authentication failures with Zimbra.  The black section will show users that entered the wrong passwords into the server and those users that entered the wrong passwords into their screensavers.

Support Portal, Creating Issues

The portal is aware of a lot of issues and sees problems on the network.  So it was a very simple step to just create a basic issue tracking module.  In the various tabs of monitoring, there is a button marked [ Create Issue ] that takes the highlighted item and automatically generates an issue and allows us to add notes.  These screens are so simple to create with Glade and python, that even as it stands now it's increasing our ability to assist users.  This development is not a fulltime project, so I'm sure the UI will not be scrutinized.  :)

The shot below shows issues that were generated automatically from the various log files.  The portal knows who, where and what -- We just needed a way to track status and add notes.  The red section shows a summary of the open issues. The black section is a very simple plugin system that allows for summary of the data.

And the issue detail screen allows for very basic tracking and note taking.

Looking For Monitor Problems

We have been seeing a few issues a day where users are having problems with monitor resolutions and some issues where software seems to put the Xserver out of sync with the monitor.  The first step was to write a little ksh script that fires at login, and basically compares their Xorg file against what xrandr -q reports.  In many cases X just kind of fixes itself and works, but in some cases the users will have problems.  So we're slowly cleaning up these issues and getting everything configured correctly.  Each little 1% improvement that you get counts and reduces user frustration.  In the issue detail above, the portal detected that a user had dual monitors that were not configured in the right way; one supported 1920x1200/1920x1080 and the other only supported 1920x1080.  Without this centralized software and a server based solution, this would be very time consuming to troubleshoot.

Other projects:   Testing NX 4 preview, prepping for Zimbra patches and upgrades, testing LibreOffice 4.1 and prepping for deployment, continued patches and testing for Firefox, Flash and Java,.

Zimbra, Alfresco, LibreOffice and Firefox

Once again it's been a while since I blogged, but I have been keeping very busy. 

Zimbra

Zimbra has been running very well, and aside from a few bugs the migration has gone well.  On June 15th, we completely disabled Evolution and Groupwise.  We had been on Groupwise since 1994 and used Evolution for many years. In recent years we just could not elevate these products past nagging bugs, even under a support contract with Novell.  So with mixed feelings we have now moved to this new software.   I have seen some blogs about the future of Zimbra, and it seems very bright.


Firefox

We are having one nagging issue with Firefox.  For many users (including me), about once a day it just closes/crashes.   I have been looking for a pattern or trend, and it seems to happen when a page is about to be displayed during a refresh; but not always.  The normal crash dump screen never appears with useful information.  I put a running FF instance on gdb, and it finally crashed.   However, it's crashing with a SIGKILL for some reason which so far alludes me.  Does anyone know why it would stop with SIGKILL?  I looked at the logs and this doesn't appear to be a OOM type issue, the server is running fine and not overly loaded.  Nothing appears in the logs at all.  Is there code in FF that tries to shut down tabs that are running slowly, and maybe this area is buggy?  Any ideas on how to get a proper crash dump with this signal?   If I cannot find it, I'm going to start upgrading various pieces including the underlying operating system which is OpenSuse 11.4.

Alfresco (Document Management)

I have been working on setting up an instance of Alfresco for the IT department to use in the coming months.  We built a sandbox several months ago for a demo and decided to proceed with this pilot project.  Version 4.2c installed easily on Ubuntu Linux and was up and running pretty quickly.  I was able to figure out how to get user accounts in LDAP to auto-provision, and am shaking out what appear to be bugs in LDAP group syncing.  Once you get used to the design of Alfresco for housing documents, you can see the power of the software.    The web interface is very clean and customizable.

There is an application for iPod/iPhone that connects to the database and displays your content on that hardware footprint:

And they have an application for iPad tablet footprint too:

So right now we're testing the workflow and taking steps in the direction of moving our IT content into this data store.  I have some ideas for ways to integrate Alfresco with GNOME and will be blogging about that in the future.


LibreOffice

We have hit one small snag with LibreOffice, with workaround.  This issue is relevant with OpenOffice too, and it's a bit unique to our setup.  The new SVG rendering engine is VERY slow over remote X, which mostly impacts users Impress slide shows.  Presentations that used to open in a second now take much longer.  The workaround is to open the presentation and save the background in PNG format and then it works as expected.  Not a very good end user experience.

As part of the Alfresco project I have been testing CMIS connections from LibreOffice, and they have advanced a lot since my last review.  Within the file picker, if you select the Alfresco connection it asks for a password:

Once you pick a file, it now asks if you want to check the file out:

And when you are done, it asks if you want to check it back in again.  It also allows you to enter a comment. The document version number is incremented and this comment appears inside of the web interface.

I put a few beta testers on LO 4.1 to check out the new side bar code.  This is "experimental" at this point, but looks like it will be a big hit with our end users when it's released for LO 4.2.  Very cool.

Other projects: Patches and upgrades to install, already a new Flash upgrade to QA and deploy.  Continued Alfresco work, setting up software for our support staff to put users into LDAP groups with a single click.

Sharing Files With Employees Via Email

I have been unhooking the last bits of software applications that were connected to Evolution and making them work with Zimbra.  I finished all of the places that allowed users to "attach" a file with the drag and drop technique described a few blogs ago.  Next up was the feature that allowed them to create a file:// link inside of their email.  This was used in order to try and get people to "share" files and not send multiple copies of the same file around the network via email.  We're all on the same server, so there isn't ever really a need to send a file to another user inside the City...it's already here and centralized.  But many people still are thinking in terms of a PC or USB sticks and feel like that's how you get files from one person to another.

The file:// link was available inside of Evolution, but is now considered an exploit and not really used in browsers anymore.  We wanted to replace the functionality however, so I found a solution and it's being tested.  I created a new MIME type for files that end with '.lnk" inside of Firefox.   Inside of this file is the path to a file located internally.  The user is then able to open these linked/shared files without physically sending a copy.  This too is very quota friendly.

When users double-click on the file, the normal MIME UI appears.  The option circled in green is "Share Via Zimbra"

 Using the same UI that was used to solve the LibreOffice temp file issue (described two blogs ago), a link symbol appears.  User drags this into their composer window and a .lnk file is attached.

The recipient then clicks on the .lnk file and a box appears alerting them that a file has been shared, and then once opened the appropriate helper application (Evince, Acrobat Reader, LibreOffice, EOG, GIMP) opens based on the file type.  I also have circled the new MIME type as it appears in Firefox.

I am logging when users perform this step and it's already being used around the City.  This seems to be the simplest way to solve this problem, and hopefully will get more people to begin sharing files until we can move in the direction of a proper document management system.

Firefox 21 Changed Plugins Folder

Today was the day to install patches for Firefox and the various plugins, and at first I couldn't get Firefox to see the plugins at all.  It turns out they moved the folder and it's not really well documented, and doesn't seem to be in the release notes.  Maybe publishing the fix will help someone.  Seems like this is going to really break things on distros if users upgrade.

Previously plugins on a multi-user server were in

[base_of_firefox]/firefox/plugins/

Now they are stored in

[base_of_firefox]/firefox/browser/plugins/

Whew!

I just looked and my last blog was March 27th; The last 1+ month has been very busy.  Not a lot of things took place that warranted screenshots or R&D updates.  OpenLDAP and Zimbra deployments both occurred and took most of my time.  Status updates:

OpenLDAP
The change to centralized passwords went off very well.  During my prep work, I created a "Password Sandbox" application that allows you to test various passwords before actually making the change.  This proved to be very popular and effective.  Part of my time was then allocated monitoring all 800 of our users to ensure they all changed their passwords and sending out daily status reports to work on 100% completion.  It's now all done and our passwords have been hardened to current metrics.

Support Portal Application
I have been putting in some patches and features for our support staff.  They could see at a glance users with passwords that still had not been changed, and made it easier to create and upload LDIF records.  We've reached a milestone with this functionality where it's very simple to create new employees in LDAP.  We also can now auto-provision new people in the Zimbra post office with just a single click.  Within 10 minutes of checking the button, the user has email.

LDAP Sync To Zimbra.
Zimbra auto provisions email accounts, and I wrote a small python script that runs at 1am to push any updates that occur from OpenLDAP to Zimbra.  Phone numbers and job titles change, and all of this information is now synced.  Support staff only has to change the information in one place, saving us time.

Zimbra Is Live
After a long ramp up time of testing, we put Zimbra live and it replaced Evolution/Groupwise.  It was kind of sad to move away from Evolution, but unfortunately we just could not get bug fixes from Novell/Suse under our support contract in a timely manner.  Zimbra was deployed with virtually no problems.  We built one server and have about 250 concurrent connections via the web interface and then an equal number of connections from mail-notification(IMAP) on the lower panel to alert them of new messages for a total of 500+ connections.  Zimbra is flying and you can barely notice the difference with a full load.  Fast and crisp.

In the past our server which provided Firefox would have about 100 concurrent users, now that users are accessing email from a browser this has jumped to about 250.  The server took this load without a hiccup and is working very well.  With 100 concurrent the machine would be about 10% busy and now it's running about 15%.  We scaled this machine with the expectation of greatly increased Firefox loads and it's working like a champ.

And The One GOTCHA
There is always one, right? :)  LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) have features embedded in various places to hand off the current document, or the current document converted to another format directly to your email software.  This is a great feature because it eliminates the need for users to convert to other formats prior to sending to outside.  A document can be created in ODT format and retained here in that manner, and then converted to DOC on the fly...and the DOC is never saved to the local file system.  In case you didn't know it did this, here is where the magic happens:

Now the bad part, it basically does a mailto: to your email client and uses &attach which it turns out is not officially in the RFC and is only available in certain email software...including Evolution.  But many/most web based email software does not allow or support it.  I can certainly see that this could be a bad exploit.  Someone could create a mailto tag that requests files of an unsuspecting users desktop. 

You cannot just tell users to drag and drop the file out of Nautilus because in many cases, it's generated as a temp file and is never saved for them to be able to find.  You can't expect them to open Nautilus in /tmp and *maybe* find their file out of the hundreds of other temp files from the day.  Clunky to say the least.

Zimbra supports HTML 5 drag and drop reception, so I worked up a prototype idea.  Jasper and Federico were so kind to help me with the drag-and-drop mechanics of GTK and we're testing this concept now.  When a temp file is generated and needs to be attached to email from LibreOffice (and other applications if it pans out)...a popup window appears on the left edge with a thumbnail of the document.  The end user can then grab the document and drag it into their composer window.  In the shot below, user has selected the option to "Email as PDF" and the popup appears with thumbnail and Zimbra composer window opens (PURPLE).  The user then drags the file into the composer (RED). 



In the coming days, I'll be testing this concept and soliciting user feedback.  If it seems to be working, I'll connect it to the rest of our applications that previously auto-attached files to Evolution. 

Next up for me is creating LDAP groups and then getting Alfresco to auto-provision users and put people into those groups.  We're at the breaking point around here of maintaining documents only on a file system and are in need of a management system.  We'll be pilot testing this in IT to see how it works.

Other issues: 64bit HP thin client is sitting here for me to test, various portal changes have been requested, continued Zimbra troubleshooting and support, various Java/Flash/Firefox upgrades.