Mercian Labels-a UK SME Label Printer on Open Source migration

I was reading this article on the 30th anniversary of spam from the BBC this morning, and it struck me that if 85% of all email traffic is spam, and the majority of these are coming from hijacked PCs, then assuming that all these PCs are Windows operating systems (and not mac or linux), then security flaws in windows are responsible for allowing spam to exist.  Therefore with existing and successful IP/DNS blacklists of spammers, if all users adopted linux or macs (or indeed kept their windows machines up to date with security fixes!) there would be hardly any spam.

Nirvana.

In my early days of learning about open source Dave at Senokian gave me a lecture on why its important not to tie linux security updates into a paying subscriptions service for any OS, as all it does is does is create problems for everyone else.  18 months on, I think I’ve understood why!

The new version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron LTS was released yesterday and last night I downloaded it and installed it this morning. The first, and most important thing to say is that it is just amazing that users around the globe can downlaod such fantastic piece of software for free, and thanks again to the community for all the work that has gone into it.

There are some cool new graphical interfaces, a new tracking tool I’ve found, and overall it just works, as I’ve come to expect linux and OSS software to do.

BUT, why was it a good idea to package a beta version of firefox in a LTS release that does not support existing firefox extensions/add ons?

This is a serious annoyance for me as I’ve come to rely on these extensions, that today don’t now work(in order of importance)

• Update Scanner (arhhh!  its fantastic, and now dosnt work)
• google toolbar (and google itself dosnt support the new firefox release!)
• Zimbra DnD drag and drop
• POPup alt Attribute
• SEO quake
• FEBE firefox backup

I’ve tried installing firefox 2 and got nowhere.  So now I have to wait, and hope and pray that a quick upgrade is available for these (and I guess many other) plugins.

 A quick note to the Ubuntu Commuity.

You are amazing, and thank you for your software. But, business people like stability, upgrading to a new version means that “stuff” should stay the same or get better.  Please dont take away what you’ve previously given us: such behaviour is what our government does to us, and it is not very popular.

I’ve been using open office for 8 months now, and had no serious interoperability issues with receiving documents that are predominately written in Microsoft Word. Well that came to an end this week with 2 incidents that are worthy of recording:

Firstly, I recieved a quotation by email for some building work that was written in MS Word. I opened it in Open Office, read it, printed it, and it all looked the same. It was competitive, (but not silly) and I entered into many hours of late stage discussion and negotiation with the sender over a potential deal. After about 4 hours of my time, it emerged that the quotation I had on screen and in hard copy was different to the intended version, and crucially missed a sub total of £7,500 that completely destroyed the bid. (There was no grand total BTW - I can do maths!).

Dropping the font size to 2 point on each of the DOC pages emailed to me I “found” the missing text, hidden under the footer graphic. I’ve never seen this in Word, and it was a lesson that all formatting dosnt display as intended on Open Office. A waste of my time and that of the bidder.

Similarly, I’ve been signing off a major deal this week as part of my duties as a non executive director of Business Link, and the signature page of an emailed document I had to sign printed differently on open office to that of the “original” document. With so many lawyers around for all sides, someone noticed and at the (very) last minute we had to get the document resigned by fax to enable completion.

Now I dont feel agrieved by these 2 episodes, but it has made me more wary. For casual use, OpenOffice writer is excellent, and I’m very grateful to the community to have use of it. However, in business we cannt ignore the current status of the MS Word .DOC document format as the “definative” document format at the moment. If you try to work with other businesses by email using open source software, you do have to be careful that you are getting what was intended.

Solutions:

1. PDF. easy, obvious.
2. Or we could just have ONE combined ISO standard for documents (isn’t that ODF???) and not 2 “standards”.

We dont want (or need) OOXML as a second “standard” in business.

Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if there was only 1, open (source), standard file format?

Well, it arrived, a lot quicker than expected.  And guess what, it works. Right out of the box, just plugged it in, a few basic Ubuntu setup questions, and its been on and in our kitchen at home for a week now.

All I wanted from this purchase was an ubuntu laptop with a web browser that worked out the box and was reliable.  Well I got it, and it just works.

Nuff said?

Well we are getting dangerously close to swapping our MS Access CRM for the new php based Postgresql system that Rich has spent a year coding now - somewhat more than I originally anticipated!

We will then be working on the phone system, and finally move all the client machines to Ubuntu Hardy LTS when its out.

We are still very committed to the migration project, but as we are 100% dependant on our CRM for runing the business, it has to be perfect to migrate, hence the huge amounts of testing that Rich has been doing.

I’ve been running only on OSS for 6 months now, and love it - no more blue screen of death, and  Zimbra email is excellent (but we need HTML signatures, a global disclaimer feature and read receipts!)

Slow progress, but progress there is, all behind the scenes.

I need a cheap new laptop for home use, and a quick search found a decent deal from Dell. Putting my money where my mouth is, I’ve ordered one for about £300. Shame it takes 18 days to arrive though!

When it arrives, I’ll right a quick review.  Basically all I want is a laptop for the kitchen that allows web surfing, dosnt cause any hassle, and works out of the box.

This is my first open source purchase from Dell, so lets put them to the test.

In the past few days we have started getting an abnormally high volume of spam that has made it way through the packaged SpamAssassin in Zimbra.  Its annoying, as all spam is, but as well as being very easy to configure on a basic level as an inbuilt and integrated package, its annoying when you cannt eeasily click a GUI interface that updates the software without a full upgrade .  We are running Zimbra 5.01 that is only weeks old, but spam is spam, and wasteful.

Any suggestions please?

Sometimes I never learn, and check that backups are working as they should be.  Last night we had a zimbra failure that resulted in the default backup schedule not being run (incremental backup at 01:00), which measn that when we had to have a fresh install today we lost all yesterdays emails, calendar changes and additions, everything.

Yesterday I spent all day writing up 3 tactical plans for the business, and lost them all becuase of this.  Fortunately I got some of the work back from a syncd copy on a PDA, but not everything.  This episode also dented our team’s confidence in Zimbra as its the second time it has happened.

We have now improved the backup regime to daily full backups and hourly incremental ones.  We did this by changing the zimbra backup cron job using WEBMIN on port 10000 on our ubuntu server using the nice GUI webpage, and it seems to work.

A lesson for other new zimbra users, the default backups just ain’t enough, so update your instalation NOW to get more backups!

Lesson learnt the hard way (again).

Mercian Labels has never had a support contract for our IT, despite the fact that its a mission critical for us.  Last year we took out a support contract with Senokian for the first time to guide us through the process, and I’m pleased to say that wea re going to renew it.

The service from Jake and Dave in particular has been great, and although we are only a small customer, they have been very helpful to us.  I’d recommend their service to other SMEs looking for REAL open source software support.  Its their core business, not an “add on”, and that matters.

We just had a minor crisis with our dedicated server (thanks to Fasthosts sceurity breech and the subsequent roor password changes) and I’ve learnt these new shell comands:

postfix flush

flushes the mailqueue

du --max-depth=1 /home/ | sort -n -r 

lists the sizes of folder when you cannt work out where all the massive log files are located!

find /home/default/selfadhesivelabels.com/system/mail/users/spam/Maildir/new -name ‘*.*’ -print0 | xargs -0 rm

deletes all our stored spam  (when you have over 100,000 to delete and normal rm dosnt work!)

I hope this is useful for someone.

The title says it all, December is a quiet time of year for us and so we planned and executed a smooth transiation to Zimbra from Outlook 2000.  It went very well, and whilst there are changes for the users and some learning, there are benefits as well as drawbacks in the move.

As we are SILL on v4.5 (come on Zimbra team, we want 5.0!) our users are currenly missing the following features:

1. the ability to access a communal mailbox (our “sales” account) without using 2 different browsers - due to be fixed in v5.0
2. the ability to use html signatures -   due to be fixed in v5.0
3. attaching multiple attachments is slower using zimbra rather than outlook
4. the signature field is only 1024 characters, and our disclaimer is longer than that (thank UK law for this), and on first try the zimbra disclaimer add on recently promoted on their blog didnt work for us

Apart from these issues, its all gone perfectly.  Again, its a good feeling.

We have 3 migrations left to go.  Our MIS (massive project) due from 2 January, then the phone system using trixbox, and finally all the OSs from  W2K to ubuntu (Q1 2008)

My home PC is an old Dell machine with a 40GB IDE hard drive.  Having just bought a new 160GB drive for backups from my laptop, I couldnt work out how to install and configure it in Ubuntu as it dosnt recognise the presence of a new drive on startup.

So, I again used GPARTED , and booted up the machine using GPARTED and formatted the drive that way as a new ext3 format.  Now its recognised as a spare disk in /media which works fine.

one final tip for novice users like me, if you want to make a directory to start with and the disk is blank, its esy to to this at the command line when Ubuntu wont let you.

go to ./media/disk directory

sudo mkdir NEWDIRECTORYNAME

chmod 777 NEWDIRECTORYNAME

This is very loose security, but if its just a home PC with no other access I thoguht this would be fine.

I hope this helps someone.  If you an expert user and can comment further, please feel free.

We’ve started migrating individual users across to Zimbra, despite V5.0 still not being released (I’ve got fed up of waiting).  So far all is well, but there are some problems that I hope to resolve when we do move to v5.0 later this month.

• users signatures are limited to 1024 (or thereabouts) characters.  This is a problem, as we cannt fit our disclaimer in it.  There is a new disclaimer hack, but we couldn’t get it to work, but wil try with senokian with v5.0
• HTML templates are needed by some people
• read receipts would be nice!

There is also the issue of accessing multiple accounts.  This feature appears to be in v4.5x but we cannt get it to work.  Hopefully we can fix this, as its very useful to access a group “sales” mailbox, as we do with Outlook currently.

3 users down, 8 to go. ..

Dave at Senokian pointed me to the GNOME partititon manager software as an ISO image to deal with my broken disk partitions.  This morning I’ve reformatted my old XP partition to an ext3 linux partition, and using that as my file store from now on.

Its taken me a couple of months of running Ubuntu on my laptop to take this step, gaining confidence in the operating system.  Recently, its been getting to the point that the windows partition was far more hassle than its confort blanket value, so its gone.

The bootable ISO disk works well as a replacement for norton partition magic for me anyway.

Just a quick update on where we are:

• the repeated delays in the release of Zimbra 5.0 which we need to migrate our remaining 15 email users is holding up a full migration away from Outlook/Exchange. The 2 existing users are very happy with Zimbra.
• Our own CRM/EIS system is nearing betatesting, but has taken twice as long as planned
• We now have a working Trixbox system with BRI card that Senokian have supplied, and I just need to find the time to configure and test it fully
• Our apache web hosting has worked well for over a year, and is very relaible.
• I have been totally on  Ubuntu/zimbra/openoffice/firefox for months now, and its great, very reliable.  The only annoying feature is the lack of working WPA on my laptop wifi, perhaps I may get this sorted one day.

Thats about it. Its a very busy time at work for me, and the migration is taking a back seat to other business issues as expected in our busiest time of year, but its still ploughing ahead.

Last week I put a support request into toodledo.com, a PHP driven website that enables you to manage your task list using he “getting things done” principles.  I’ve been using toodledo.com whilst I wait for Zimbra 5.0 with task support.

I was very pleaseantly suprised to get an immedaite repsonse from Jake Olefsky there with some great dialogue and tips to help solve my query.  All this from an unpaid service - thanks Jake, your website is a cracking one.

I upgraded from 7.04 feisty to 7.10 Gutsy on Friday on my laptop , and it went without a hitch.  Just a quick thank you to the ubuntu community for all the work that went into it.  As a business user who is benefiting from better functionality and saving money from the work of the community, I feel the need to say thanks again.

I look forward to the day that we at Mercian Labels can put our first bit of code back to the community.

Just a note that we have found it very difficult to get Zimbra and Asterisk phone system to coexist on the same box.  Senokian report that it can be done,m but its not worth the development time, its just better to get a new box and just do a standalone trixbox instalation.

So, we are waiting on this new box from Senokian to start the configuration of our phone system from Swyx to Trixbox.  Watch this space.

Umm, a month on, we are still waiting for the new 5.0 version of Zimbra to start rolling out  all our office to an open source email system.  RC1 was a very limted release and not available, and RC2 has been put back again to 31 October 2007.  Its a frustrating delay, but not a serious problem.  Hence little blog posting in recent weeks.

Before we migrate any more users across to Zimbra we are waiting on the new version, that should support tasks (which is important). Apparently its due out Monday in RC1, so we have booked some support with Senokian to get the upgrade installed.

Of course there is the recent news that Zimbra has been bought out by Yahoo! for $350m… I hope this is good news, as I’m not aware of yahoo being a major supporter of open source. Hopefuly the development will be pushed along a little quicker after the dust has settled, as I for one would like to see the introduction of read receipts in Zimbra which still isnt there!

There has been a log of blog comment on the sale - if you are interested I find the Open Road a good blog.

http://blogs.cnet.com/8300-13505_1-16.html?tag=bc

Part of my role as MD of Mercian Labels is keeping upto date with lots of different sources of information. The web is by far the most efficent way fo doing this, but it can be all consuming…. drowning in data.

Enter the benefits of an open source plugin for Firefox, update scanner. Its a fantastic tool to save you the trouble to checking all of the websites you try to keep in touch with, and clearly alerts you when they change. I use it for monitoring trade information websites, competitors, suppliers, forums, google webmaster tools etc.Now this type of tool isn’t, to my knowledge, available to integrate with closed source browsers such as IE.

Its simple, this is an excellent open source tool that saves me time. All credit to the author for the idea, and thank you Pete Burgess.

I’ve only used my laptop with ubuntu/firefox/zimbra for just over a week now (retaining my now redundant xp/outlook dual boot system in case of crisis…). Its been great, only a few problems, and the following notes may be of interest to some:

• nothing has crashed. period. I’ve had to do a single SO kill once when I lost my internet conenction whilst running remote desktop in full screen mode which I didnst know how to close, but thats it. Before this, I used to regularly kill XP and or outlook to carry on working. This is an improvement in reliability.
• Its great having your email server side, with no need to HAVE to have your laptop to do email, calendar and contact work. Ok, you can do this with many different systems (outlook does this, although I always ran client side), but Zimbra does this well.
• Zimbra is very reliable and syncs very well with my nokia E90, enabling full functionality on the move. But, it does have its drawbacks. There is no read receipt function, there is no task managment (yet, due out shortly) and setting up disclaimers is a sys admin job and really should be in the management console.
• I lost some email uptime (but no emails) this week due to a slight configuration update, but this was no problem and fixed very quickly and competantly by Senokian.
• Quanta Plus website design program doesnt even open for me. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, and no joy. So, I’m resorting to website updates by remote desktop onto our work server.
• Toodledo works fine as a substitute for tasks in zimbra, but I’d rather have it all on one package.
• The nokia e90 has a microphone defect that gives noise occasionally for no reason, so it will have to go back if it gets worse for a replacement.
• I still cannt get WPA wifi encryption to logon. This is a serious problem that I wil need to refer to Senokian when I next meet them face to face to be solved, as it will be painful not to have this functionality permanently.
• As I’m still running dual boot, most of my fire archive is still on the NTS partition. I have yet to move all the files over and repartition the drive.
• The suspend/hiberate function dosnt work on my HP nx6125 laptop, am still looking for a solution.

Overall, I’m very happy, and proud of the switch. I’m free.

As a business we still have a long way to go, with lots more php programming of our CRM system by Rich and configuration of our astrix phone system, but we are well on the way.

I will be migrating more users to zimbra once v5 is out in 3 weeks time and shutting down our outlook useage.

This weeks job is the phone system. Watch this space…

Last week I finally manage to get hold of a nokia E90 communicator, which has been the major holdup in my migration completely to open source. As I run my business a lot on the move, I decided early on that I needed to retain a mobile phone sync function that I had used for 4 years (nokia phones, PC sync and microsoft Outlook). The sticking point for me was that my current nokia 9500 communicator is not supported by zimbra mobile as its an old symbian operating system, so I needed to wait until the new E90 was launched to migrate away from outlook and windows XP.

Well after many delays, I got hold of one last week, and spent about 6-8 hours learning it, configuring it and migrating all my contacts and calendar across to zimbra ready to sync the new system.

Tasks included:

• migrating contacts and calendar from the 9500 by bluetooth, because my outlook PST file was so corrupt that I couldn’t export them to CSV’s or iCAL files.
• installing the nokia exchange software (nice to see nokia using php on their site!)
• redirecting my email to the new email address
• migrating all my email archive using IMAP to the zimbra server (which took a few hours)
• getting used to the zimbra interface
• exporting my outlook tasks (using copy and paste!) and importing them into Tooledo.com which I am using a temporary task manager until the next version of zimbra is released with task support.

Finally it was time to cermononiously turn off windows and reboot into ubuntu with all the business functionality I need to operate with open source as my sole software suite. God it felt good.

But, I reflected on the cost of this to date. Its been expensive in terms of time, very expensive. Probably a hundred plus hours of my time to get to this stage. Open source is great, reliable and cheaper in terms of license fees, but the migration is punishing.

Advice to new business startups is go with open source from the start - far better for compliance, functionality, reliability and cost saving. The more you get hooked into developing systems that are dedicated to microsoft, then the harder it is to get out of it. If you are considering open source as a short term cost saving exercise in your business and plan to use existing hardware or have special software, then my advice is dont. Have a long term strategy, or accept that its cheaper to stay with what you have.

That said, I dont regret the migration for a minute, and now I am the first person in the business running only open source software I will report on my experiences in the coming weeks before we start the roleout for all our other employees.

Its a great feeling to be free (in a very small individual user way) of the restricive, slow, unreliable xp/outlook configuration I USED to use!

Just a quick post to confirm to any future user that zimbra mobile works fine with the nokia e90.  Its a great piece of kit, and although there are annoying design “faults”, I havent come across anything yet that is problematic in relation to zimbra or open source software.  A most useful feature is the IMAP email polling/scheduled sync which works well.

To setup, follow these instructions.

We are giving a key presentation to our staff next week about the company wide migration to linux and open source.  This presenation is going to be critical to get the buy in and goodwill that we need to make the migration a sucess.

One of the ideas to generate some “goodwill” to fly the linux flag is the distribution of Tux penguin toys, clothing and other promotional merchandise across the workplace.

I’m finding it hard to find a decent supplier of this type of stuff in the UK who has a good range of products and offers some volume pricing.

Any ideas please?  If you are a seller, please add a comment with your url and  you can have a free link!

It was good to see this week that Dell are finally selling new PCs and Laptops with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled.

Jono Bacon has already blogged about his Dad buying one - I’ll be looking seriously at Dell’s offerings for our next round of hardware purchases.

Good decision Dell!

I’ve been checking what legancy applications I currently use in windows tat I dont already have a linux solutions for, and looking for linux replacements for the following 4 applications:

• winscp substitute to give a GUI SSH interface between linux machines (no substitute found)
• scanner.exe - a port scanner to check our internal network (no substitute found)
  
• dreamweaver (I’m planning on using Quanta Plus unless there is anything better?)
  
• seoelite (dies under WINE)

Please throw in a comment if you can suggest any possible solutions to explore. Thanks:)

I’ve wanted to say this for many months now. I am writing this post on a laptop thats now only running open source software!

HURAHH!!!

It has been a game, and I’m not quite fully there yet, but I’m now running the following:

• HP nx6125 laptop
• Ubuntu 7.04 Fesity Fawn
• Open Office
• Firefox
• Evolution email (interim until I move permanently to Zimbra in the next 2 weeks.)

To recount some of the problems I’ve had in the past week whilst migrating :

1. I had to buy a copy of Norton partition magic to create new partions on my drive for the linux swap and OS
2. let the automatic ubbuntu instalation package make the new partitions, if you do them manually the GRUB dual boot loader dosnt work (or it didnt for me as there was no “make bootable button”)
3. On first instalation I couldn’t get the wifi working, but cracked that this morning by reading the ubuntu forums
4. I had to learn how to export firefox bookmarks and resetup my firefox profile , plugins and settings
5. Setting up realplayer, or any software toview streaming video from the bbc website was a pain, but evenually got that going.
6. I didnt know that linux cannt read ntfs file systems, unless you install the appropriate package from the ubuntu universe. neadless to say, it works perfectly.
7. the forward and back microsoft optical mouse browser buttons dosn’t work, but worked using this tutorial

Lots of stuff works well that I was expecting problems with. .. battery managment, soundcards, skype, ethernet, SD card reader, CD reader, keyboard etc.

Outstanding issues are:

• I havent tried the CD burner yet, but I dont use that very often at all.
• bluetooth not tried yet.

Am very pleased and releived so far!

Picking up on the blogs of others (linux world and open source advocate), I am really pleased to hear of a new open source substitute for MS Project, a project management piece of software.

OPENPROJ is currently in beta, and runs cross patform using Java.  Now I’m not normally a fan of the common java software interface, but I’m looking forward to using this for my business R&D planning.

After previous discussions with Senokian about such software some weeks ago, I resorted to planning a current project using a gantt chart  using open office calc.  its OK, but coudl be better.

I hope that OPENPROJ works well for me, I’ll give it a go, but I’ve never used Project management software before.

I’ve had some interesting chats with Martyn at Severn Delta in the past few months, as we ae both undertaking a business migration to open source. They are also blogging about their migration and other business issues if you are interested (they link to a good resource to generate free online barcodes!).

Recently we talked about opensource accouting solutions. Small businesses tend to use 2 types of accounting software in my experience: Accounting software for the prouction of management accounts, credit control and stock control, and payroll software to administer the burden of UK tax legislation for our esteemed Chancellor. Sage leads the market in the UK for offering this software packages, although there are plenty of others. We use Sage line 50.

In particular, Martyn and I talked about payroll solutions. My understanding is that Paythyme is the definative payroll system, Jon at Clocksoft is very proud of the error checking rates he got from HMRC audit testing. I’ve never used it, but its the only one I’ve heard of thats taken seriously.

I havent come across a serious challenger to Sage for accounting purposes. Some packages such as EGS from Senokian include an accounting function in them, but I ont know of a standalone peice of software. For legal compliance reasons, as a Director I would have to be very confident of the accuracy and support of a substitute for the market leading SAGE package we use, but am open minded on the subject. If you know of such a system, please leave a comment. I’m sure both Martyn and I would be interested.

I came across this launch of ubuntu linux dedicated server hosting by Fasthosts, our main hosting company. In previous posts, I’ve been trying to find a solution for a long time to the problem of syncronising postgresql databases between different linux distributions. In particular, since Fedora has such short cycles and 5 is not well (if at all) supported now, I would rather use ubuntu LTS 6.06 for our hosting and have applied to Fasthosts for a migration plan.

This got me wondering why its taken Fasthosts so long to catch onto the Ubuntu trend. And why oneandone.co.uk havent ? Fasthosts and oneandone are, I believe, the biggest UK hosting companies, but it seems they dont have fantastic NPD planning if they havent caught onto the big 2006 launch of ubuntu with LTS.

Anyway, my point is this. Frequent release cycles with no lon g term support is a real issue for businesses. Yes, I could go to Redhat or another commercial distro, but ubuntu 6.06 is better for us. Its just a shame that the big hosting companies have taken this long to catch on and offer ubuntu.  I can see the first “cost” to us of moving to Fedora5 being a difficult, time consuming and expensive migration of our dedicated server.  Watch this space.  Fastshosts, I’m waiting on your response!

now I just dont get this.

1. Microsoft has a c.90% market share and every conventional IT hardware seller sells machines with a microsoft operating system installed.
2. IT hardware is ferocioulsy price competitive
3. Linux distros are getting much better, and more comprehensive (with ubuntu leading the field), are free, and offer a distinct performance and price advantage to IT hardware resellers
4. Loads of businesses prefer to use laptops as workforces become increasingly mobile/remote working
5. Nobody is putting a concerted effort into developing a business selling laptops with linux preinstalled in the UK.

Now this bugs me. I know the linux emporium sells linux laptops, but the basic models are out of stock a high percentage of the time, and the higher spec models aren’t great value for money for many users. Talking to John at LE at Lugradio Live, I know he has serious supply problems outside of his control. Others I have found dont seem serious about linux on laptops.

Here are my thoughts:

1. I want to buy a laptop with all the hardware working running ubuntu linux - I have money to spend right now
2. I expect to pay a comparable price for a laptop with xp/vista preinstalled, to give some margin back to the seller for getting all the notorious;y difficult laptop hardware to work for me, (saving me the time).
3. I cannt find a UK equivilant of system76.com , someone who is serious about linux laptops and offers a good range of hardware with ubuntu preinstalled.

This is a migration barrier for UK SMEs to move to linux.

Someone out there, catch onto this opportunity. I would much rather put my business’s hard earned cash into a UK IT business to pay for the skill and time in installing ubuntu, rather than pay for a microsoft license.

This is a great USP for someone. If you are doing this already, I cannt find you, so please contact me!

Whilst reading through Jake Stride’s list of favourite blogs this afternnon, I found this post advocating that Ubuntu needs a secure remote desktop . I was thinkning aout this last week on the sys admin course at openadvantage, but the closest I saw was remote running of applications over SSH using X (as I understood it), which is far from the remote desktop feature that I find usefulon a windows server.

Now I’m not particularly paranoid about web security, but the ubuntu remote desktop described on this post  sounds too insecure.  I’ll have a look at FreeNX and seeif it works. ok.

Ubunti is supposed to be linux for human beings .  Businesses like remote desktop (without command line stuff which is only for adminsitraors).  so….

Dear ubuntu community, please include this feature, its very useful to businesses, and will signifiacntly enhance the popularity of ubuntu with businesses.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6897050.stm

Good news for open source advocates, the BBCgoverning body has agreed to review the decision to only release their TV on demand player “iplayer” only for microsoft platforms.

This was discussed in detail at LugRadio Live last weekend, and is very good news as far as I am concerned.  Its only right that all BBC viewers should be able to view content on only platform, not just that of the market leader (by market share, not performance!)

LugRadio Live was excellent, there is plenty of commentary on it elsewhere, well worth the visit. I never realised that there were so many dedicated and capabale FOSS people out there so passionate about open source.  Respect to you all.  I hope to be able to contribute something back from my company in due course.

I have just finished a rewarding 4 day course at OpenAdvantage on linux admin, very presented and run by Paul Cooper. I got a lot out of the course, but there was a wide range of attendees, from people with (literally) decades of unix experience to me, a microsoft convert making early steps in the command line environment. The course was based on the linuxIT course , for people working towards the linux professional institute exams (which I’m not taking!)

Overall, an excellent course. What I want to take away is a crib sheet of linux commands and notes I can sync into my address book, so that when I next need to run stuff on the command line its easy to hand. So here goes… Please note that these are my crib notes, not a definative linux command line crib sheet!

BASIC COMMAND LINE COMMANDS

echo “test” returns the text

CREDIT=300
echo $CREDIT returns the variable

ls -hl lists files in detail in human readable format
pwd tells you where you are in the directory structure

env shows the environment you are working in

ls -l >errors.txt redirects the output to errors.txt

set shows all variables
| Pipe symbol glues the lot together

ls f* gives all files starting with f
ls f???s.* gives all files but only with the right number of characters
ls [a-e]*.* for a range
ls my\ documents for files with a space in the name

SHORTCUTS

cntrol shift c and control shift v are copy and paste

tab gives tab completion of a predictable string
up arrowauto completes from the history of command lines submitted

home and end keys more up and down the line
man is the manual command for HELP!
eg
man ls

q to quit

alias ll=ls -l is a shortcut command

cd /media is absolute command to the media

FINDING FILES

find -name “f*.txt”

or

locate / “f*.txt”

REMOVE FILES

rmdir for directories
rm -r music removes the directory and all contents

COPY FILES

cp fil* my\ documents to copy

MOVE FILES

mv is move file

FILES SYSTEMS
ext2 is the linux old equivilant of fat32, a basic file format for linux
ext3 joural based file system - best to use

swap file partition should be double actual physical memory

lspci lists the hardware

RUNNING AS ROOT

sudo runs a single command as root
su is switch user eg
su - root

FORMAT DISKS

sudo fdisk /dev/sda runs the fdisk command

df tool for mounted and
du -h /usr as an example of finding file sizes

PERMISSIONS
user u
group g
other o

read r or 4
write w or 2
execute x or 1

character 1 is file info, 1-3 is user,4-6 is group,7-9 other

chmod u+x files.txt gives execute permision to users

PROCESSES

pstree -p shows the runningprocesses
ps ax shows all process for all users

kill pid number kills the process
or
kill -9 pid number

top gives the running processes

nohup runs outside the session

TEXT EDITOR

at is a basic text editor
control D stops it

head -5 hello.txt gives you the last 5 lines of hello.txt

grep term filename > results.txt

VI or VIM is a good embedded text editor

q! to quit

esc to go back to command line
x to save and escape

SSH

at command line you can ssh to any url

STOP AND START PROCESES
eg
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh stop

w
whoami tells you who is on a machine

SECURECOPY

scp root@ the address :whoteist.txt whitelist.txt is a secure copy

TIMING

crontab -l to list
crontab -e to edit

eg
45 14 * * * /bin/touch /home/demo/results.txt
will touch the results file at 14:45 every day

NETWORK

ifconfig gives you your network information, your IP address etc

Open Advantage are running a new course on linux administration, and I’ve tried to get a place.  Its really difficult trying to assess the capabilities of Linux when you cannt use the command line well.  I just hope I can get a place so I can talk the same language as Rich as he contonues to install new applications on our new linux server.

We’ve had an interesting couple of weeks in preparing to migrate, not without its problems.

Problems we have faced include the following:

• as outlook 2000 is not supported by Zimbra as a migration path, we have had to setup IMAP to transfer emails from outlook to Zimbra, which works ok
• exporting my calendar from outlook to an ICAL file wasnt easy, and you need this tool to do it. When you have an ICAL file, you can import it using a CURL command
• by default (and I dont know why), all calendar appointments were imported not in UK time, but in USA time, offset by about 7 hours. We had to get Dave at Senokian to fix this . This meant we had to clear the zimbra calendar and start the import again, which worked ok.

tips:

TO CLEAR THE ZIMBRA CALENDAR

to clear the zimbra calendar by hand, this is done using the zmprov command. As the zimbra user, run the command ‘zmprov’. This will take you to one of the admin consoles, with the prompt zmprov>
Enter ’sm MAILBOXNAME@mercianlabels.com’ to select your mailbox. The prompt will change to reflect this.

Run the command ‘emptyFolder /Calendar’. This will do what it says on the tin.
Hit Ctrl-D repeatedly until you’re back at a prompt you recognise.

TO USE CURL TO IMPORT AN ICAL FILE
curl -u adrian –data-binary @/tmp/calendar.ics \
http://localhost/service/home/adrian/calendar?fmt=ics

(You can copy-paste, the \ at the end of the first line indicates to the
shell that there’s a follow-on line.)

This assumes that you’ve put your calendar at /tmp/calendar.ics

So…. I’m almost ready to migrate, having got a solution to import all my email contacts using a CSV import, calendar using ICAL and CURL, email using IMPA, and a substitute task manager using toodledo.

The only thing I dont have yet is a sync proceedure for my mobile phone, which is essential to me.  As my 9500 isnt supported (why Zimbra guys???  can you get a more business orientated phone????) I will have to buy a new E90 when they launch, or use a temporary measure like road sync.

The trouble is, I have a packed diary for the next 2 weeks out of the office, so it will be July before I look at this again seriously.

I’m quite behind on my blog, and a lot has gone on in the past 2 weeks in respect of my personal migration from outlook to zimbra.

First, I need to be clear that I am totally dependant on my sync’d nokia 9500 running with outlook to manage my business, my life and the variety of commercial projects I am running at any one time. Like any business, I get through a lot of email traffic, and I only run electronic calendaring, and task manger for all my 150-200 tasks running at any one time.

Having decided last week to start my migration to Zimbra, Dave at Senokian came over to give us an introduction to zimbra, do some configuration and get me setup.

There are problems, and potential solutions if you are expecting identical functionality in zimbra to outlook

1. There is currently no support for tasks in the web based zimbra interface. WHY??? I was suprised and v dissapoiinted to find this out. Tasks supprot is due out in the next release in October 2007, its finished development, but not in there in the current release.
2. The outlook migration tool in Zimbra only support migrations from outlook 2003, not outlook 2000, 2002 or 2007. I bet their are good reasons, and I know from the formums that I’m not the only only to whinge about this, but its bloody stupid. Lots and lots of potential ZIMBRA clients arent running the 2003 version, and its creating an extra barrier to migration for the uncommitted
3. You can export contacts as a CSV using he built in tool and import them into zimbra, but its not perfect
4. Calendar, ARHHH! Outlook dosnt suport export to ical format, so you have to download a tool in visual basic to do the export, and then import it into zimbra using a curl proceduire. its beyond me, so Senokian’s sys admin is hopefuly going to guide me through it tomorrow.
5. Zimbra dosnt support spam whitelists by default, it has to be setup seperately. Again, this NEEDS a simple web interface. Again, senokian have been good at helping us to solve this, but for any organisation like us receiving 4000+ spam emails a day, a whitelist is essential. Another job yet to be done.
6. Zimbra is fully web based, so no connection = no email, web or tasks…. unless you use the new Zikbra desktop tool, currently in alpha release. Seems to work well on my laptop though, I’m hoping to give this a full workout in due course.
7. writing emails to lots of people looks very slow, as you cannt drag and drop/select lots of addresses quickly. more comment will follow as I get stuck in.
8. I cannt copy my emails across from outlook 2000 to zimbra yet. Apparently there is an IMAP solution, but we havent got it configured yet. again, watch this space.

BUT, Zimbra is web based, more secure, more accesible (from any web terminal) and sems to work well. only time will tell.

We’ve bought a 25 user zimbra pro/mobile license, the first open source license we have bought.

I’m hoping to get my account transfered / configured within a week, ready to migrate all my life to Zimbra.

glup.

Jake over at Senokian put me onto Toodledo, a free online tool that has a Firefox plugin

http://www.toodledo.com

Its not open source, but  its a useful interim tool for those (like me) that rely heavily on the GTD (getting things done) system of time management, but dont have outlook task manager (I am moving away fromall outlook v shortly) and know that Zimbra dosnt yet support tasks (why?????)

Off topic, its an excellent book and system by the way.

As the project leader and guinea pig for our migration, I’ve moved from IE to Firefox as my permanant web browser.  I’m still keeping an IE instalation for compatability checking of any of our new websites, but I do like firefox.  The plugins are great, I have ben using this SEO plugin for a while which is great if you do SEO stuff

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

All the ebanking stuff works fine, surfing, tools, everything.  This is not suprising to some, but there are many people out there that dont know about alternative browser choices.

I prefer firefox now, despite being an IE user for a decade.  Converted !

I’ve been running openoffice on my laptop now for seeveral weeks, and have to say its really good.

There are a few new things to learn, numbering formats in Writer are slightly different to Word, and some XLS charts dont import well into Chart in open office and need redesigning.

I dont agree with some that say openoffice is slow.  Its not, certainly on my laptop with normal business files.

Overall, I’m pleased with the move to openoffice.org software - no loss of functionality, and its even a little quicker too!

Roll on the next migration stage…

Last week my outlook PST file exceeded 2GB and died.  Using the MS recovery tools I managed to get a lot of it back, but certainly not all, and It look me the best part of 10 hours to start a new uncorrupted PST file, import and syncronise all my calendar, contacts and email.  This is a serious aste of my time, and this is not the first time this has happened either.

So, today I am going over to Senokian to get some training in Zimbra, and move my email, contacts and calendar to a Zimbra platform.  We’ve bought a Zimbra Mobile license, so I want to see how easy it syncs with my nokia communicator 9500.  If it dosnt, the new mokia E90 communicator is launched next month…

Great news for us, Dell have indeed decided to specify Ubuntu as their prefered linux distro.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6610901.stm

That makes buying new PCs, and especially laptops much easier!

We are not currently a Dell user, but will almost certainly become one after this announcment.

Good decision Dell!

I haven’t blogged for a few weeks on the progress of our migration project. 

The main change for us in migrating to a new open source system is that our CRM is moving from MS Access to a totally new web ased system.

This involves an awful lot of work to write a new system from scratch that meets our needs as a specialist label printer.  Rich has found this to take longer than we expected, and progress has been slow but sure.  We have now got the main MVC framework up and running, with an autoupdate AJAX system that we like and need.  Currently we are formatting lots of internal web reporting pages, so there is very little to report thats interesting really.

This is likely to take another 4 weeks before its complete.  At that stage we will have a lot more to report, as we do some seriouls user testing, and configure test setups with Zimbra for email/calendaring , and Trixbox for our phone system.

I hope that the update is useful.

Some time ago I had the pleasure of doing a PHP course at openadvantage.org run by Jono Bacon.  I remember a conversation at the time about LUGradio, which at the time I put down to his passion for heavy metal music, which isnt my taste. 

I have only just worked out that LUG means Linux User Group, and that LUGradio is a podcast on linux.  So I downloaded the latest MP3 podcast (my first ever podcast in fact) and listened in.

Its very interesting content if you are learning about the world of linux and the various technical debates associated with the open source world.  You are best listening to this outside of work, as some of the content and language is not very PC at times, but these guys are very knowledgable and the debates interesting.

Its got me hooked, and I am now working my way through the back catalogue. Recommended.

I posted some weeks ago about our main microsoft server at work falling over becuase it was raining, or some other meaningless reason.  Well, yesterday, it happened again, but was sunny.

OK, its nothing to do with the weather, but the serious point is that in my experience the timing of failures on our microsoft server is either random, or is significantly delayed from the start of the cause identified.  For instance, yesterdays failure, which required me to go into the office and  fix it on a saturday, turned out to be related to friday nights daily backups.  Why the web hosting failed on saturday lunchtime is a mystery to me, but its annoying that it failed in the firstplace, that it failed due to an unrealed software package second, and the timing was random thirdly.

I sincerely hope that our ubuntu server turns out to be more reliable and understandable!

Last night I  reformatted my my PC and installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn beta on it, the first client PC we have moved completely to open source.

I had tried the ISO version as a demo which was slow, but seemed to work ok.  As it is a spare PC at home, it didnt matter if it didn’t work, as the exercise was really just an experimental  confidence booster.

Cutting straight to it, it worked. Fine, easy, no problems, no crashes, worked first time around.  As its primarily a “social” PC, its mainly used for web surfing (95%) and some skype and saving family photos. Skype went on fine, sound card worked ok, USB2 external HDD, everything.

The only unresoved issue is streaming real player for watching the BBC newscasts, but I gave up after 10 minutes - I’ll get back to it later.

Fundamentally, this has given me a lot of confidence in the ease of installing ubuntu and its stability on thick client PCs.

My first working day of using Write and Calc rather than Word and Excel has gone fine, no problems.

I like this open source stuff - full steam ahead!

Ever since the early days of this project, I had seen the openoffice.org suite, and decided that it was good enough for us in almost every way.  In fact, I took this decision on the basis of 1 presentation from the guys at openadvantage.org and a couple of minutes surfing of reviews.

 Today, I dediced to download the latest version, and set the defaults on my PC to run all my word processing, spreadsheet and presentation requirements from now on using open office.  My motivation in doing this was to trial the installation myself, and get a couple of months hands on experience with using the suite before the other 20 staff at Mercian Labels are asked to run it - lead from the front and all that!

First of all, I checked out the alternatives using this review at wikipedia, prompted because I saw a BBC video clip on the Bristol city Council IT dept moving the entire organisation to open source, saving over £1M GBP in fees.  However, they were using start office, and to be honest, I couldn’t see any reason for an SME not needing serious suport to commit to anything other than the openoffice.org suite.  There were issues over java licensing for some of the higher level functions, but with the sun announcment for making java open source at some stage, I dont see it as a threat to small users.  If something goes wrong, then we can change very quickly.

 So, I downloaded the latest release today, openoffice 2.2 from here and installed it on my laptop running XP pro.  I committed to opening and using all existing docs in openoffice rather than microsoft software to show good intent!

First impressions are:

• its good, very good
• its better than MS word for everything we do in an SME
• it runs quicker than MS  WORD and EXCEL
• the WRITE user interface is so similar to MS WORD that you dont need much, if any retraining
• It includes a very fast “save as PDF ” function which is excellent
• existing word documents open perfectly well in oo.o and save fine too
• importing custom dictionaries is a bit of a pain, but under 5 mins to learn, and under a minute to repeat when you know how.
• I cannt see any features missing that I would regularly use, with 1 major exception.  I havent tried the BASE program yet, but I know that it dosnt support VBA scripts well, if at all.  As this is our major software at present, this is a seriouls problem, and why we are writing our entire CRM in PHP on a web platform.

Overall, I like it.  I wrote my PhD thesis in WORD in 2000, and I would have doubts about trying to make a massive document with complex formatting and breaks in oo.o, but I#m probably just being paranoid.

OO.o looks excellent, and a credit to the developers over many years.  I will comment any bugs I find in the coming weeks here on this blog.

although the techies love it,probably for good reason, a lotof user interface with linux is at the command line, not the usual GUI interface that we are geneticly engineered to know and understand…. this means that if you really want to use some of the linux features and functions, you have to know how to use the command line.

I have some basic unix experience from numerical modelling research, but not enough that I didn’t have to start at square one.

I tried this website, which I was impressed with, and guided me through the basic functions well.

www.linux.org/lessons

Its worth a go , after 30 minutes I could even find and load our website files and edit them with the VI text editor.

I still prefer the GUI ubuntu interface though!

Just spotted this on the BBC

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6506027.stm

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/ideastorm/ideasinaction?c=us&l=en&s=gen

One of the problems we have put on the back burner was migrating the directors laptops, currently running XP, to linux.

This would solve it easily.  I tried running ubuntu off disk in demo mode on my HP laptop, and it wouldn’t support some of the drivers, including the wifi.  I didn’t try to fix it, I’m just too busy and lacking in knowledge of Linux.  I just voted for the move on the Dell website instead!

Dell supporting linux is a real godsend for SMEs who just want to buy something that works, no faffing about, and laptops are notorius for being difficult to setup.

I wonder what distribution Dell will use?

Some time ago we tried to write our own timekeeping software to log the working hours of all our staff.  We tried using VBA in conjunction with an access database, but never got it to a working standard.

Now we are back on the hunt for some simple php / mysql type system that will allow staff to clock in / clock out to record their working horus, not project specific, just number of hours a week worked.

This may be our first opportunity to write some code and release it back to the community, but we dont want to waste our efforts if there is an established solution out there.

I’ve looked, but cannt find any basic time keeping software.  If you know of anything, or suggestions of where to look, please feel free to leave a comment.

So far, I’ve googled it, but got nowhere.  Looking on source forge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phppunchmachine/

this looks like a possible contender, as long as we rewrite it in english.

any comments?

As mentioned in the previous blog, we’re currently deciding how our new project should flow. By this I mean, do we use the more conventional methods we’re used to (hard coding our php for each individual page) or to take the plunge and go the Model View Controller (MVC) route.

I’d decided a few days ago to look into MVC, although i’d touched on this within Ruby on Rails, i’d never done it within PHP. After some initial research, it seemed that this wasnt as complex and as far fetched as I initially though - therefore worth a look in my opinion. With help from online tutorials and people in the know of MVC frameworks, i worked through and created a simplistic framework that worked with the “Smarty” templating system, which was also then tied in with PEAR::DB for database abstraction.

I created a few simple functions, simply passing data throughout our framework to display customer details, and then change this depending on search critera. Not exactly complex, because this is easy to do with in PHP anyway, but the thing that struck me was, suddenly im not repeating code, and things are beginning to look more logical; in the way that I know exactly where I have to go to edit files, I know exactly what page does what, and the whole process seems to flow in controlled manner. This seemed a plus point for me, and I thought we may be onto a winning idea.

A brief meeting was then held between myself and Adrian who talked over this aproach; we also consulted Dave (briefly), Jake and Gregg and Senokian for the expertise in MVC Frameworks.

Their opinions were mixed, there were plus points and downsides to the idea we had, the main downside thats stuck in both our heads is the learning curve it may cause to fully understand how this MVC will work, and how we can train someone else if they needed to.

The opinions of Jake and Gregg at Senokian basically stated that it may not be a good idea for us to go down the MVC aproach due to the learning curve that would be needed by myself in order to get upto standard, but if we did decide to go down that route, and i felt comfortable in aiming towards using MVC then there are numerous frameworks we coulc use, such as smarty.php.net.. This basically allows us to create the design quicker, and perform template swaps/alterations all in one place.

This has brought some confusion between us, because Gregg and Jake have a lot more experience with MVC frameworks than me, so I have to take their advice, and have to admit im really in two minds now

My opinion now is to spend a few days trying to work with this framework, and come up with some useful functionality. If i fall into problems then we may need to give the MVC approach a miss, but if things work how we expect them, this may be an area we need to solidly look into.

Our migration to linux based open source hinges on the sucessful implemention of a php - postgresql database to run our CRM.  Now I have done some coding, in fortran and VBa, but I’m a businessman, not a coder.  What coding I do I enjoy, but its not my role really.

An issues came up yesterday what I saw as strategically improtant to the sucess of the migration, and this was the adoption or otherwise of MVC as a clever way of managing duplicate code.  Now I like this idea, but as I lack formal training in software development, I dont have the background to understand this fully.  There are many sides to the argument, and the debate will continue internally today as we look at other options recomended by Jake and Greg at Senokian.

This post is a quick warning to managers, directors, and other business people driving a project like this.  Sometimes your non technical background will let you down, and you cannt speak the same language as the coders becuase you dont have the training, and reading the odd web page about a subject is not enough to get by.

It is likely that on this occasion I may have to make an uninformed decision on a very technical issue.

In a previous comment, Dan Kegal ( a WINE developer) asked what software we would like to run under WINE but dont think we can do.

Easy, here is the list:

1. SAGE line 50 network edition - many, if not most small businesses run SAGE accoutning software, and I dont believe that it will run on a linux platform, but as yet we havent tried it.
2. Graphic design software:  we are a label printer, and as such our graphic design function is vital to us.  The Gimp is just not powerful enough for professional level desgin, colour seperation, dispro, and we expect to have to keep one PC just for design, running Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, and maybe photoshop
3. Ad hoc bits of software.  These may, or may not work on wine, aagin we have not tried them, but our conservative assumption is that they wont.  These are mostly SEO pieces of software like the banned by google tool  and seoelite

If anyone has any expereinces of using these I would be grateful for feedback.  When we do get around to trying them, I will post the results here.

Our sales team are the heaviest users of our CRM system, and not used to Ubuntu, Firefox, or indeed an web based databases.  Following good advice from an IBM case study, we are holding a user testing experience at an early stage to get feedback on the user experience.

The success of an Open Source migration to us is heavily dependant on getting buy in from the users, and their involvment at an early stage is, to me, crucial.

Using our existing Acess front end to a SQL database, we dont have the problem of our users forgetting to update/save records they are woking on.  It does it automatically.  This is a weakness of PHP web based interaction with databases, you either have to remember to save the record, or you could loose your edits.

Ths way we are proposing to work around this is using AJAX, so every change we make will save itself once the user moves off the record field.  At least this is the theory - Rich is trying it out as we speak.

Hoping that this blog may interest other businesses looking to migrate to Open Source, I’ve posted this press release.

Just a quick follow-up post here regarding how to achieve auto incrementing on a PostgreSQL field.

Thanks to the advise from Senokian I was able to create our database with the exacy same functionality as our MSSQL one. The only field we were concerned with was the customerid one, which should increment by 1 each time a record was added.

An example of this is:

CREATE TABLE customers (customerid bigserial not null);

You can either use serial or bigserial depending on your needs.

And that’s all there is to it. After you issue that command, PostgreSQL will automatically create the sequence for you, and deal with everything else that is going on in the background. If you don’t give the sequence a name, in this case it will/should call it customers_customerid_seq

P.S don’t forget if you want to use your table properly with PHP etc, you need to grant permissions on the table, i.e.:

GRANT INSERT ON customers TO username;

MSSQL has the lovely added functionality of Auto Increment. Meaning that when you add a new record to a table, it automatically gets added to the next ID. To clear this up, an example is. Customer A has an ID of 1, we add a new record to this table, and it’s automatically given the ID of 2, so the table is logical in the way it flows. If auto increment was not in place each time we add a new record we would need to get the last ID entered, add one, then manually insert the record with that ID, which is too much hassle for a consistently used database.

The problem arises here; PostgreSQL doesn’t have an auto increment feature!

This doesn’t mean we cant have the functionality of auto increment, it just means we have to work around it.

PostgreSQL has something we call Sequences, which when added to our table can perform the same role as an auto increment field. I’m still currently looking into this, but it doesn’t seem too hard.

The reason for our previous problems now became apparent.

This is down to data types; PostgreSQL has a different data type for some of the fields, such as:

MSSQL — POSTGRESQL
Bin — Boolean
Datetime — Timestamp
Nchar — Char
ntext — Text
nvarchar— Varchar

This wasn’t the end of the world, it just meant that each field in our database that would need changing, would need to be checked to see if it met the constraints of the PostgreSQL data time. One other thing to note is, a lot of these fields don’t allow NULLS, which is also the same for int (int is the same data type in both databases but MSSQL allows NULLS, PostgreSQL definitely doesn’t.

The quick fix for this was to change every NULL value (that we could) into a 0 (zero) or another number that would tie into our database. Maybe not the best solution, but these fields weren’t being used properly any way (hence the NULLS).

2 days later after changing multiple fields and multiple records in MSSQL, I was ready to try again. I ran the script, got all the information into the .txt file and ran the file.

No Errors. A quick SELECT COUNT(*) from customers; showed 20000 records. SUCCESS!

As already mentioned in a previous blog, we want to migrate our database from MSSQL to PostgreSQL and the first step of this was to see if this was even possible.

We decided on a fairly straightforward table (customers), that had many fields and many records (20000), but little in the way of constraints.

There are a few guides online showing the easy steps to go from a typical MSSQL database to the advantageous PostgreSQL, one of them being (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/techdocs.29)

Basically the steps in that guide explain how to use the MSSQL Enterprise Manger tool, to firstly create a script of your table, and then change all invalid data types, and then how to create a dump of data and export it to PostgreSQL.

This is all very self-explanatory, if the above process works; but as per usual, not everything goes to plan!

When trying to export our data, we had the unfriendly error message (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION) and that was the end of that.

Research into this error message suggested the need to upgrade or MSSQL to SP4, but it already was!

Further research began to show that other people had been having the same issues, and that there was not much of a solution present.

At this stage, I now considered looking for another method to migrate our table, there were a few easy and complex ways to do it, such as running scripts on our database, or using other extraction tools, and I tried a coupe of different methods but the same error message stopped us in our tracks.

I then decided to try an alternative way, by using a custom PHP script. I made the script to read each record from our MSSQL database, and to add each INSERT statement created to a .txt file. This seemed to work fine, until I tried to run the file on our Linux server to add the 20000 records. The first time I ran it only 8 records were entered, this is a big gap compared to 20000!