Software

I'm a fan of Trac wiki / issue tracker. It has the correct price (free) combined with all the features I need in software development. Since all my Linux-development is done in RHEL / CentOS -environment, getting a Trac to run requires tweaking. Also after our production server hit the 10k-connection limit and we had to change to Nginx, I don't have any Apache daemons running. Given that constraint, I definitely need some tweaking of my own.

Software needed:

• Nginx, get my RPM from http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/CentOS/6%20x86_64/Nginx/
  
• uWSGI, get my RPM from http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/CentOS/6%20x86_64/uWSGI/
• Trac, get my RPM from http://opensource.hqcodeshop.com/Trac/
  

Setup:

Traci is built with Python, but it is typically installed anyway. uWSGI is the glue between Nginx and a Python app. My uWSGI should run out of the box. It defaults to seeing Python apps in directory /var/www/uwsgi/, so make sure to create the Trac parent file trac_env_parent.py into it:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# file: trac_env_parent.wsgi

import sys
sys.stdout = sys.stderr

import os
os.environ['TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR'] = '/var/www/uwsgi/trac'
os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '/var/www/uwsgi/.egg-cache'

import trac.web.main
application = trac.web.main.dispatch_request

Also it is a good idea to make sure, that uwsgi-user can write into the .egg-cache-directory. Permissions should be:

drwxr-xr-x.  2 uwsgi uwsgi  4096 Jan  8  2012 .egg-cache

Then bind Nginx into uWSGI-app. In my case I defined a virtual host for that. Fragment of nginx.conf:

server {
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name my.trac.own.com;

    location / {
        include        uwsgi_params;
        uwsgi_pass     127.0.0.1:9001;
    }
}

The file /etc/nginx/uwsgi_params is something out of a default Nginx source. I didn't change anything in it.

After that it's only getting the Trac properly configured with your DB-backend and filesystem.

What others are doing:

• http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/wiki/Example
• http://mediacorecommunity.org/docs/install/nginx-uwsgi.html

This is a follow up on Windows Backups -article I wrote earlier.

I've been running Acronis on daily basis on a couple of Windows-machines to take a backup into a NAS-box. I have been mostly happy with the software, but ... Here is my grievance list:

• Consolidation: Completely worthless! A number of users according to Acronis' forums are having problems with it. The recommended approach is not to use it. See: 36241: Consolidation Process Hanging. There was an occasion when I waited for 30+ hours for the consolidation to complete. It did, but come on! 30 hours to copy 80 GiB of data! On a best case-scenario it does really weird things, aborting with no obvious reason and leaving temp files lying around.
  
• Laptop backup: Works ok when destination NAS-box is reachable, completely worthless when not. There is NO way to cancel the job besides holding down the power button (my laptop does not have a reset). I spent roughly an hour trying to cancel / kill / nuke / stop a backup job which is failing to write a backup for obvious reason that the destination drive was not there to be written into. I shouldn't be too hard to automatically abort a backup job when the network connection is not there. This is the worst issue I've been experiencing.
  
• NAS-drive not found: This happens occasionally on a laptop, but not on a desktop PC. The problem is a weird one. Every possible test I do from TrueImage or Windows Explorer indicate that everything is there and accessible, but the job does not see that for some unknown reason. This can be circumvented with a cancel job / start job -pair. Sometimes a previous, already existing backup needs to be pointed manually to ATI. I don't know why it lost connection with the file which has existed after ATI wrote it.
  
• Support period: Pretty short for new user. Couple of weeks or so. I got my product installed and running, but when there were real issues (see above), the support was already gone.
  

I've been looking for any suitable competing products, but apparently there are none available. The lack of better backup solution leaves me running Acronis TI. This is pretty close to a good product, but apparently the developers cannot be bothered with this type of easily fixable minor issues.