Strigi website

I am not yet addicted to blogging and it is still a pain. It is more like you are preparing the food and every now and then people enter and ask you "what's cooking?". But there actually is much in common between Open Source development and TV cooking show. So this time I will split my reports into small posts: about website, testsuite, analyzers and GUI. Hope it works better this way.

Strigi website has been broken for some weeks. Not that broken, but people could not log in and post updates. For dynamic projects, like Strigi, staying on-air means a lot. And even much more with aKademy 2007 around the corner.

I have spent too much time programming PHP in the last years (I wish that was C++), but I did not expect this experience to be helpful in my chemical GSoC project. Well, I fixed Drupal and now the site is alive again. But there won't be a story without a mystery. In this case it's the mysterious mail service at Sourceforge. Many content management systems, and Drupal is not an exception, want to send mail to the users. By abuse/security reasons Sourceforge web hosting does not provide access to sendmail, nor does it allow outgoing network connections. But there is a workaround.

Sourceforge shell servers and web servers are different machines sharing same disk partitions. Though you can not send any mail from the web servers, you can do it from your account on your Sourceforge shell server. Thus, put your outgoing mail from web server in a queue in mysql database, fetch it regularly by a cron script running on your shell server and feed it to sendmail. It works well, except for the cron: there is crontab on the shell server, but unfortunately, no crond running. Another workaround is to fetch mail from the mysql queue by a cron script running on a remote mailserver. A PHP XML RPC call does the job.

Résumé: moving the website to another hosting is not a bad idea after all. What do you think?