Setup WebDAV with LDAP from scratch

Because of an issue we had at the office, I would like to have a local installation of a WebDAV. I know how this works: you install, remove, install, install... and software keeps dangling. So it should be running inside a VM Here's a summary of the steps taken, maybe one day I'll write this out to be a true blogpost :)

1. First of all I set up a CentOS 6 machine inside VirtualBox, no biggie here. Oh, and make sure to install CentOS with Java support, we'll be using that.
2. Then I had to install an LDAP server. I tried using OpenLDAP, but there has been some rework in how this should be configured and up till now ( april 2012 ) I couldn't find online documentation on how to set this up. Luckily I found the Apache Directory project: Apache DS is an easy to configure LDAP server. And well documented as well :D
3. To test if the LDAP server is setup properly I used JXplorer. Use the deploy edition, because the .bin installer is not working properly ( as mentioned in this article).
4. The only way I know how to get WebDAV running is by enabling it through the Apache HTTP server. It was by default installed, I only had to enable it through the menu System->Administration->Services. And yes, there it was... Running at http://localhost:80
5. Now to set up WebDAV. For that, I used this all-in-one article at HowtoForge
6. To test if setting up went ok select Places->Connect to Server. Settings:
   Server type : WebDAV (HTTP)
   Server : localhost
   Folder : webdav
   User name : test
   
7. Now to use LDAP to authenticate users is actually quite easy, see this article.
8. Maintaining users within LDAP appeared to be a bit more difficult than expected. Importing LDIF files with jXplorer as described here finally worked for me.

Dropbox and SELinux

Since the number of computers I'm using is drastically increasing in the last couple of years ( both private and business ) the need to share data across those systems increased as well.

Dropbox is the perfect solution for me to solve this issue.

Though there have been discussions about the privacy of your data on dropbox, I can live with the explanation dropbox gives.

The silver bullet of dropbox to me is the fact that I can sync my data across all my systems, being Windows, Android and Linux ( though still no client for my Bada phone, guess I'll have to face the music and buy me a new phone ).

I must admit I did have some problems getting the Linux client software to work. It would not install properly, stopping at 97% when it tries to download the daemon. Apparently SELinux had something to do with it. Luckily I came across this excellent article, which helped me fix this.

Tibco documentation now online

Yeay! Good news to all those that occasionally want to have a peek in Tibco's documentation (don't ask me why, sometimes it just..... hapens ), but can't.

Tibco opened up ( what looks like all ) it's product documentation at http://docs.tibco.com.

Adding programs to Windows Run-menu

I like to use my keyboard as much as I can. Having to switch to my mouse to start a program started to annoy me. I know one can add programs to his personal folder ( c:\documents and settings\ ), but that doesn't work for all apps. You can't install everything in c:\documents and settings\, right?

Using shortcuts is the answer here. With one caveat: when creating a shortcut with the windows wizard, it uses the full name as shortcut name. So a shortcut to putty.exe for example would result in a putty.exe(.lnk) (the .lnk extension is there, though it is hidden)
Shortcuts created in this way cannot be started using the run menu.

The solution here: strip the extension!

Create a shortcut (.lnk) in c:\documents and settings\, press -R, type and presto!

Make windows forget network credentials

List of stored network credentials:
net use

Pick a network connection to forget, and delete it with
net use [connection] /d

Problem starting iProcess server

When I tried to restart the DEV iProcess-server ( on a RedHat server system ), the following error appeared in the sw_error file while trying start:

Failed to get shared memory handle for WQSINDEX

It appeared that this was due to a faulty shutdown, which left some files in /var/tmp/.

After removing those files (having checked that _all_ processes were stopped ), master server started up again.

update: See also this message on TIBCOmmunity WQS is getting suspended when starting iprocess engine..