phpMyAdmin Tutorial at DebConf13

The phpMyAdmin team is visiting DebConf13 in Vaumarcus, Switzerland.

On Tuesday August 13th, at 15:30 (CEST), four members of the phpMyAdmin team will do a tutorial on basic features and showcase some exciting advanced functionality, in the second talk room at DebConf13.

You are welcome to visit us if you are around, or tune in on the live stream.

It will be recorded, so you can watch it later as well.

upgrade Dell PERC6 firmware with Debian

How to upgrade the firmware of a PERC6 RAID controller in a Dell PowerEdge R510 server, that's running Debian 6 (Squeeze).
Dell does not officially support Debian, thus the provided upgrade package does not run automatically. But with some tweaking, you can get it done.

This manual works for both PERC6/E and PERC6/I integrated (onboard chip). I haven't tested it with PERC6/I, but I guess it will work as well.

Step 0 :

Install the latest Dell OpenManage Server Administrator software (OMSA 7.1). This is not necessary for the upgrade, but useful all along, because you get a (web)interface and some command line tools to manage the server hardware. You get log messages also.

There is a community supported port of OMSA for Ubuntu, but it works fine on Debian Squeeze.

Step 1 : get the firmware

You can get the firmware update packages at the Dell support pages. Select the binary for RedHat.

You will have to get the actual firmware upgrade file from this package :

bash SAS-RAID_Firmware_F96NR_LN_6.3.3-0002_X00.BIN --extract perc6e_fw

This will extract the contents of the binary into folder perc6e_fw. Using bash is needed because the scripts are intended for sh, but give errors when run on Ubuntu or Debian. You can also change the intended shell in the first line of the BIN file and run it.

The firmware upgrade file is located in perc6e_fw/payload/*.rom

Step 2 : get the firmware uploader

I couldn't get this Dell binary package to actually update the driver, so I used the firmware updater from LSI. The PERC 6 RAID controllers are rebranded LSI controllers, so this works.

Get the StorCli tool from the LSI website, choose the Linux version, it is a zipped RPM package.

First unzip it :

unzip Storcli_linux_10175.zip

Then retrieve the upgrade tool from the rpm package :

rpm2cpio storcli-1.01.75-1.noarch.rpm | cpio -idmv

This will convert the rpm to a cpio archive and extract the files from that cpio archive.

Now you have the storcli tool to upload the firmware upgrade file to the PERC controller. Here is a manual on how to use it, but we'll only need a few commands.

Step 3 : Upgrade the PERC controller firmware

Now you just have to upload the Dell PERC6 firmware to the RAID controller with the LSI tool :

storcli /c0 download file=FW1371E.rom

This will start downloading the firmware file into the controller.

After the download is finished, you have to reboot your server. The new firmware will be installed when the server is booting.

Please note that the /cX parameter defines which RAID controller you will send the firmware upgrade to. If you have only one PERC RAID controller in your server, you can use /c0. If you have multiple, it is safe to assume that the onboard PERC6/I is in 0 and that a second one is in 1. If you have more than 2, you will have to find out which controller is which. You can do this with this command :

storcli show

git subtree module, with .gittrees config file

I have written about the git subtree module before.
It has been improved, to allow defining your subtrees and imported projects in a config file, in order to update them without having to specify the repo url and branch every time you push to or pull from an imported project.

So, first you need to setup the subtree :

$git subtree add --prefix=other_project \
     git://github.com/your_tree/your_project.git master

It imports the master branch of a git repository located in git://github.com/your_tree/your_project.git into the folder other_project of your git repo.

A file .gittrees in the root folder of your git repo is created :

[subtree "other_project"]
    url = git://github.com/your_tree/your_project.git
    path = other_project
    branch = master

With the subtree being defined in .gittrees, you can make changes to this imported project and you want to push them back to the original project, you can use this :

$git subtree push --prefix=other_project

Or if you want to update the imported project with changes from the original project, you can use this :

$git subtree pull --prefix=other_project

You can also push all changes in imported projects to the original projects, with

$git subtree push-all

It will push all changes to projects that are defined in the .gittrees config file.
Pull changes from all defined subprojects is done with :

$git subtree pull-all

BTW : All subtree commands must be run in the root folder of your git repo.

BTW2: the subtree module is not part of the core git package. So if you want to use it, you will have to install the module first.

Clone the subtree project :

$git clone https://github.com/helmo/git-subtree

In the git-subtree directory, run as root :

#./install.sh

This will copy the git subtree module to the git script folder. You can now use the git subtree module.

phpMyAdmin accepts 6 students for GSoC 2013

phpMyAdmin is pleased to announce that it has accepted 6 students/projects for Google Summer of Code 2013 :

• AJAX error reporting : Mohamed Ashraf
• Automated Testing : Adam Kang
• Automated Testing : Ayush Chaudhary
• Interface improvements : Kasun Chathuranga
• Re-factoring: server view : Bin Zu
• Refactoring: SQL Executor, Column's Structure Manipulation : Supun Nakandala

Details about the accepted projects can be found on the wiki.

Congratulations, good luck and happy coding to all the students.
phpMyAdmin looks forward to their contributions to the project.

Google Summer of Code 2013 info session @ UGent

About 45 interested students showed up for the Google Summer of Code 2013 info session that was organised at Ghent University on Monday, April 15th 2013 in the Faculty of Engineering in the Plateau building.

First there was an general introduction on what Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is, explaining the goal of the program, the benefits for the students and an overview of the timeline. This was followed by a few Open Source organisations that will participate in this year's GSoC, presenting themselves and potential projects to work on, and a few students who took part in past versions of GSoC, sharing their experiences with the audience. This turned out to be a nice mix of information and different experiences that gave a good view for the attending students on what to expect from applying for and participating in GSoC.

Some useful advice that was spread :

• Put enough time in the preparation of your project proposal. Your future mentors will review this and will base their decision on accepting you mostly on this proposal. Make sure you explain well what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, and how much time you will spend on each part. Be as detailed as possible.
• Be active in the community of the organisation you want to work with. This shows the mentors that you are really interested. Don't be afraid to ask questions, or to participate in a discussion on the IRC channel or mailing list. It helps when your name rings a bell when the mentors are going through all the project proposals.
  The sooner you start with this, the better. Follow the mailing list and try submitting a few patches. It was suggested that you choose an org for next year already and contribute to it, as a preparation for GSoC 2014 (if there would be one).
• Choose a project you like. If you get accepted you'll spend almost 3 months working full time on it, so it helps if the programming language, developing environment, code base and your project are something you are comfortable with. This does not mean that you should choose a too easy project, there can be some challenge. That will keep it interesting for you. Just find something you can chew but is challenging enough to keep you going.
  It was mentioned that having some proficiency with the programming language you will be working with is usually a good point, but one of the organisations (ESUG) mentioned that learning a new language (SmallTalk in their case) can be a nice experience as well.
• It is an interesting experience, that will give you some real world development experience, will get you introduced in the Open Source community and looks nice on your CV.

The evening was closed by a reception with room for the students to talk to the speakers and ask questions.

Thanks to the Google Open Source Programs Office for the promotional material, the Open Source organisations (phpMyAdmin, SAGE, ESUG, MuseScore, Debian and Samba) and previous GSoC students (Jasper Van der Jeugt (worked on Haskell) and Sander Bogaert (worked on K9 mail)) for their talks and sharing their experience, and to the student associations (VTK, Zeus WPI, Ceneka) and UGent for their help in organising the event.

Google Summer of Code infosessie @ UGent

Zin om deze zomer $5000 te verdienen met een vakantiejob? Lijkt het je wel iets om vanuit thuis te werken wanneer het je uitkomt? Wil je een echte bijdrage leveren aan open-source software? Google maakt dit mogelijk dankzij de Google Summer of Code!

Op maandag 15 april organiseren Zeus WPI, VTK en CenEka een introductieavond rond Google Summer of Code. Dieter Adriaenssens, mentor van het phpMyAdmin-project, introduceert het concept en de procedures. Daarna komen enkele mentors hun projecten voorstellen, afgewisseld met studenten die hun ervaringen van vorige jaren delen. Achteraf kan je eventuele vragen aan de mentors stellen of gewoon gezellig napraten bij een drankje op de afsluitende receptie.
Deze introductie vindt plaats in de Jozef Plateau-zaal in de Plateau en begint om 19:00. Iedereen is welkom! Om een idee te hebben van het aantal aanwezigen vragen we om op deze pagina in te schrijven.

Ben je zelf een mentor of heb je ooit meegedaan en ben je geïnteresseerd om je project voor te stellen of ervaringen te delen op deze avond? Laat iets weten!

Wanneer : maandag, 15 april 2013, vanaf 19:00
Waar : Jozef Plateauzaal, faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen UGent, Plateaustraat 22, Gent
Gratis toegang, maar best op voorhand inschrijven.

Why Test Driven Development is cool!

Test Driven Development (TDD) is cool! And useful. By writing tests for a method or class before implementing that class, work on that class is not finished, until all defined tests pass. Provided of course, that you wrote good and extensive tests, that cover as much as possible all the different cases and possibilities of how the method/class should behave.
And the upside is, that you can be sure that all your methods/classes keeps working later in the development process, because you have tests that continuously check if all classes keep behaving like you expect them to. If you would change something that would break the expected functionality of a method/class, then at least you will know, because some tests will fail. That's a few bug reports avoided!