disjoint thoughts

Here’s a quick and dirty way to get a JumpBox to backup to a Windows XP Home machine. Look here if you’re dealing with XP Pro. Clicking any of the images in this post will load a larger, and more readable, version of the image.

Step 1: Create the folder you want to store your backups in.
Step 2: Share the folder. Right click the folder and go to “Sharing and Security…”

Under the “Network sharing and security” section, check the “Share this folder on the network” and “Allow network users to change my files” checkboxes. In the “Share name” textbox put the name of your share, in my case “backups”

Step 3: Configure backups on the JumpBox. In the admin interface of the JumpBox, go to the Backups page. For the “Share Type” select Samba. Username and Password are required by the interface in the current version (1.0.1 at the time of this writing), but they don’t matter. Just put something in both fields to get it to work.

The “Server Name” is the IP address of your Windows machine as the JumpBox sees it. In my case, I’m running my Trac JumpBox on my Windows XP Home laptop using VMware Player in “Host-only” networking. To figure out what IP address I need to use I:

• go to start menu and select “Run”, type “cmd”, press Ok
• in the window that comes up, type “ipconfig”
• look for the section that says “Ethernet adapter VMware Network Adapter VMnet1:”
• in this section find the ip address, this is the ip address to use

The “Path” should be whatever you entered under “Share name” in step 2. In my case: “backups”.

Click the “Configure Backups” button, wait for everything to validate. Once its finished check that the “Configuration Status” at the top of the page says “Configured”. Now you’re ready to run backups.

Step 4: Test out your configuration. Click the “Run backup now” button in the JumpBox admin interface. Once it finishes, you should find a .tgz file in your backup folder.

Step 5: We’re not done yet. We had to allow network users to modify the files under the backup share folder. This works fine for the JumpBox, but what if someone else came along, found your share, and decided to delete or take all of your backups?

To fix this, go to the Start menu, click on “Control Panel”, open “Windows Firewall” then click on the “Exceptions” tab. UNCHECK, “File and Printer Sharing”. This will cause Windows Firewall to block all file sharing on your computer.

Now go to the “Advanced” tab and UNCHECK “VMware Network Adapter” entries. This disables the firewall between your computer and the JumpBox running on WMware Player.

Did I mention this is the quick and dirty way to do this? I’m sure there’s a better way of doing this, but I’m no networking or windows guru. Also, this won’t work if the JumpBox isn’t running on the Windows XP Home machine where the backups are being saved.

Step 6: Retest backups to make sure everything is still working. Run another backup from the admin interface and check for the backup file in your share folder.

Hopefully this helps someone. I’ll find a cleaner way of doing this and post a follow up.

Update: If your backups stop working, check that everything you did in step 5 is still valid. I believe that upgrading VMware player resets some of these settings.

At some point in installing and/or upgrading the latest version of VMware Player I seem to have borked my preferences. On each startup a virtual machine I would be forced to agree to the terms of service (which I had done before), and I would receive a couple of error messages complaining about “Unable to read user preferences.” and a missing preferences.ini file. Once past all the dialogs and errors everything seemed to work fine, but this happened every time I started VMware Player… so it quickly got annoying.

In the error dialog it gave me a path to the file that it was having trouble with “C:\Documents and Settings\Ben\Application Data\VMware\preferences.ini”. Looking at the file in question, I noticed it was empty, 0 bytes. So I uninstalled VMware Player, deleted the WMware directory under Application Data, and reinstalled WMware Player. Upon the first startup of VMware player, the preferences.ini was recreated with the correct data and everything worked fine and dandy.

The latest version of the JumpBox admin interface uses ThickBox for its cool visual effects, and prototype for handling AJAX requests. The problem is that ThickBox depends on jQuery, and jQuery and prototype don’t like working together.

Both jQuery and prototype define “$” as an alias in the global namespace. When you try to use the “$” shortcut and both libraries are included, the browser complains. Lucky jQuery gives you a way to override “$” and let prototype use it thus resolving the conflict:

 <html>
 <head>
   <script src="prototype.js"></script>
   <script src="jquery.js"></script>
   <script>
     jQuery.noConflict();
   </script>
 </head>
 <body>
 </html>

After calling jQuery.noConflict(), you can still use jQuery “$” functionality, but you have to call it using “jQuery(’foo’)” instead of “$(’foo’)”.

Now that jQuery and prototype can coexists peacefully, how does ThickBox work? Well… out of the box it doesn’t. ThickBox uses the “$” syntax, but expects to use jQuery’s implementation of it. So to get ThickBox to work, you need to replace all instances of “$” with “jQuery” in thickbox.js. Now ThickBox should be using jQuery exclusively, jQuery and prototype won’t conflict over “$”, and everything should work fine and dandy. Note: I’ve only tried this using ThickBox 2.1.1, jQuery 1.1.1, and prototype 1.5.0, but it should work on the latest and greatest versions.

After a year of development, I’m proud is announce that we are officially selling JumpBoxes! Want an easy way to setup Drupal, Joomla!, MediaWiki, PunBB, vTiger, Wordpress, SugarCRM, Trac or DocuWiki? Look no further.

Over at JumpBox we’ve just released a Subversion and Trac JumpBox:

http://www.jumpbox.com/tracsubversion-development-jumpbox/

For me personally this is the most exciting JumpBox we’ve created to date. I’ve used svn and trac at my day jobs for a couple years now, but never for any of my personal projects. Setting trac up has always been a pain which I’ve refused to endure. Now that setup has been boiled down to a 30 second easy-as-pie process, there’s no excuse to not use it.

Please check it out, I’d love to hear feedback on any aspects of the JumpBox.