A few months ago, at an AspirationTech conference in Oakland, CA (one the best conferences I've ever been to - by the way), I found out about UserVoice ... a website that provides "users" [of a product] a chance to voice their opinions about what features that'd like or bugs they want fixed.
So, if you're an OpenMRS user and you have an idea for a feature, click on the "Feedback" link on the left edge of your browser to submit an idea to OpenMRS. This is kind of an experiment at the moment, but I'm hoping we can solicit some good suggestions from our users and give you guys "a seat at the table" as we start planning out our road map for the upcoming (already in-progress) year.
There's also GetSatisfaction. I haven't used it yet, but have heard some good reviews. If you have comments about either or another feedback tool, please let us know.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
On Cloning a Hard-Drive: The Problem
Over the past three years I have had the worst luck with computers: 2 system board crashes due to unknown issues, one system board crash due to an accident involving some water and an ethernet cable, two or three hard-drive failures, wireless drivers that mysteriously stop working and won't allow you to uninstall/reinstall.
The common theme to all of these issues, is that I've almost always lost at least a weeks worth of work trying to get back up to speed, re-installing the OS and software, configuring a development environment, downloading email, etc.
Needless to say, I either need to stop using computers or figure out a backup/cloning strategy.
For now, I chose the latter.
I just finished setting up Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 on my laptop. I installed Eclipse, MySQL, Tomcat, Java, downloaded email, blah blah blah ...
So now, I want to clone this hard-drive so I can swap in the cloned drive if the first drive ever fails. I will clone the primary drive onto the second drive once a week (or more often if I can find some software to manage it for me).
I currently use Acronis True Image Home 11 for my backups, but for some reason it does not allow me to clone the drive. After contacting Acronis "support" a few times, I have decided to start looking for an open-source solution to the problem.
The common theme to all of these issues, is that I've almost always lost at least a weeks worth of work trying to get back up to speed, re-installing the OS and software, configuring a development environment, downloading email, etc.
Needless to say, I either need to stop using computers or figure out a backup/cloning strategy.
For now, I chose the latter.
I just finished setting up Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 on my laptop. I installed Eclipse, MySQL, Tomcat, Java, downloaded email, blah blah blah ...
So now, I want to clone this hard-drive so I can swap in the cloned drive if the first drive ever fails. I will clone the primary drive onto the second drive once a week (or more often if I can find some software to manage it for me).
I currently use Acronis True Image Home 11 for my backups, but for some reason it does not allow me to clone the drive. After contacting Acronis "support" a few times, I have decided to start looking for an open-source solution to the problem.
On Cloning a Hard-Drive: The Solution
Thanks to Renaud and Jim for their input.
Jim - At some point I'll adopt a "constant backup" solution (using an online service or local backup server), but for the time being, I think I found a winner.
So I want to clone the hard-drive (source) that I've spent the past few days configuring onto a second drive (target) so that I can swap the two drives without worrying about reinstalling applications, reconfiguring email accounts, etc. The idea is that I will clone the source drive onto the target drive at least once a week so that I can stay up-to-date with Ubuntu patches and packages. And if something goes wrong with the source drive, I can plug the target drive in and I'll be ready to go. I'm also planning to make and copy an .iso of the source drive over to another external hard-drive just in case things don't always work with the disk-to-disk cloning.
In order to solve this problem, I used CloneZilla 1.2.1-23 to clone my current Ubuntu setup (with all applications, emails, and other data) over to a second drive (target).
First of all, the size of the target drive matters -- it cannot be smaller than the source drive. That's pretty obvious, but I was hoping there would be some way for CloneZilla to see that only a portion of the source drive was being used and copy just that data over to the target drive, resizing partitions as needed.
No big deal. I just had to play around with the partitions on both drives to make sure that the source drive was smaller than the target drive. There are plenty of tools that allow you to edit the partitions on any of your attached hard disks, but it's not very safe to edit the partition used to boot into Ubuntu since the source drive is mounted.
Therefore, I created a new bootable CD off the latest System Rescue CD ISO (http://www.sysresccd.org) in order to run gparted from outside Ubuntu. This CD is a life saver and has a lot of great tools. Resizing the partitions took about 10 minutes and once that was done, the CloneZilla part was a breeze.
Next time I run through the CloneZilla process I'll write the exact instructions down. For now, I'll just say that I walked through the CloneZilla wizard and gave logical answers to questions, answered "yes" to all of the paranoid "are you sure?" questions, and after about 20 minutes, the target drive was cloned and bootable (CloneZilla also installs GRUB on the new drive).
Jim - At some point I'll adopt a "constant backup" solution (using an online service or local backup server), but for the time being, I think I found a winner.
So I want to clone the hard-drive (source) that I've spent the past few days configuring onto a second drive (target) so that I can swap the two drives without worrying about reinstalling applications, reconfiguring email accounts, etc. The idea is that I will clone the source drive onto the target drive at least once a week so that I can stay up-to-date with Ubuntu patches and packages. And if something goes wrong with the source drive, I can plug the target drive in and I'll be ready to go. I'm also planning to make and copy an .iso of the source drive over to another external hard-drive just in case things don't always work with the disk-to-disk cloning.
In order to solve this problem, I used CloneZilla 1.2.1-23 to clone my current Ubuntu setup (with all applications, emails, and other data) over to a second drive (target).
First of all, the size of the target drive matters -- it cannot be smaller than the source drive. That's pretty obvious, but I was hoping there would be some way for CloneZilla to see that only a portion of the source drive was being used and copy just that data over to the target drive, resizing partitions as needed.
No big deal. I just had to play around with the partitions on both drives to make sure that the source drive was smaller than the target drive. There are plenty of tools that allow you to edit the partitions on any of your attached hard disks, but it's not very safe to edit the partition used to boot into Ubuntu since the source drive is mounted.
Therefore, I created a new bootable CD off the latest System Rescue CD ISO (http://www.sysresccd.org) in order to run gparted from outside Ubuntu. This CD is a life saver and has a lot of great tools. Resizing the partitions took about 10 minutes and once that was done, the CloneZilla part was a breeze.
Next time I run through the CloneZilla process I'll write the exact instructions down. For now, I'll just say that I walked through the CloneZilla wizard and gave logical answers to questions, answered "yes" to all of the paranoid "are you sure?" questions, and after about 20 minutes, the target drive was cloned and bootable (CloneZilla also installs GRUB on the new drive).
Thursday, December 11, 2008
On Healthy Haiti
I just found out about an organic & fair trade coffee p that is donating proceeds to Partners In Health.
http://www.deansbeans.com/coffee/HAITI
http://www.deansbeans.com/coffee/HAITI
On User Feedback
For those on the OpenMRS dev call this morning (11 Dec 2008), here's a look at a project using uservoice.com.
https://slimtimer.uservoice.com/pages/general?referer_type=top3
I found out about UserVoice while attending the AspirationTech conference in Oakland right before Thanksgiving. A lot of open source projects and web 2.0 sites are using it. It's a pretty cool site and might be a good way for us to solicit feedback from our users with respect to what features they want to see implemented next. It doesn't (yet) integrate with issue tracking systems (like JIRA/Trac) or ToDo sites (like Remember the Milk), but I'm not sure that would even be necessary or useful.
Let me know what you think.
https://slimtimer.uservoice.com/pages/general?referer_type=top3
I found out about UserVoice while attending the AspirationTech conference in Oakland right before Thanksgiving. A lot of open source projects and web 2.0 sites are using it. It's a pretty cool site and might be a good way for us to solicit feedback from our users with respect to what features they want to see implemented next. It doesn't (yet) integrate with issue tracking systems (like JIRA/Trac) or ToDo sites (like Remember the Milk), but I'm not sure that would even be necessary or useful.
Let me know what you think.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
On Starting the Modern Compiler
Today (10/09/2008) I ran into a weird bug with Eclipse 3.3.x. The other day, I had to remove my internal hard-drive because I was sending the laptop in for repair. I used an external exclosure to turn the internal hard-drive into an external hard-drive and plugged it into the USB port on my personal laptop. The external drive came up as the E:\ drive. Anyway, long-story-short I was abe to use my Eclipse workspace on the external drive with my personal laptop for a few days. I had to switch some Eclipse settings (i.e. ANT HOME) in order to compile code. When I switched back to using the drive in my laptop (yesterday), I kept getting the following error message.
Buildfile: C:\Documents and Settings\Justin Miranda\My Documents\My Workspace\LogicRestModule\build.xml
init:
compile-module:
[javac] Compiling 5 source files to C:\Documents and Settings\Justin Miranda\My Documents\My Workspace\LogicRestModule\build
BUILD FAILED
C:\Documents and Settings\Justin Miranda\My Documents\My Workspace\LogicRestModule\build.xml:42: Error starting modern compiler
After playing around with the Java Compiler and Ant settings and restarting Eclipse a few times, nothing seemed to be helping. I downloaded the latest version of the code I was trying to compile and was able to successfully compile that code. But on restart, an attempt to "ant clean", then "ant package-module" caused the same error.
Then I remembered a nice little trick: Eclipse Clean. For some reason that worked.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
On running multiple instances of OpenMRS on the same server
I couldn't find a good place for this on the OpenMRS wiki, so I decided to add it here. I will add this post to the wiki once it's completed and ready to be posted.
To setup multiple instances of OpenMRS, follow this general procedure:
[runtime] Make sure Database connection URL is pointing to the right database.
connection.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/openmrs?autoReconnect=true
[global] Make sure that the form entry global properties are distinct.
formentry.infopath_server_url=http://localhost:8080/openmrs1
formentry.queue_dir=formentry/openmrs1/queue
formentry.queue_archive_dir=formentry/openmrs1/archive/%Y/%M
In Malawi we had an issue that caused the creation of duplicate encounters for each form entry. We realized that it was due to the fact that we had multiple instances of OpenMRS running. In our scenario, the form entry queue processor was scheduled on both instances and was looking at the same queue directory. Therefore, both tasks got to the queue at the same time and processed the incoming form entry submissions. We happened to be using the same database instance for each (one was a read-only OpenMRS instance).
To setup multiple instances of OpenMRS, follow this general procedure:
- Checkout the latest source code from Subversion
- Create separate instances of your database (i.e. openmrs1, openmrs2)
- Create separate instances of your OpenMRS runtime file (i.e openmrs1-runtime.properties)
- Build an instance of the WAR file
- Rename openmrs.war to openmrs1.war
- Copy the openmrs1.war to openmrs2.war
- Modify runtime properties to point to correct database
- Copy openmrs1.war, openmrs2.war to Tomcat webapps
- Start tomcat
[runtime] Make sure Database connection URL is pointing to the right database.
connection.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/openmrs?autoReconnect=true
[global] Make sure that the form entry global properties are distinct.
formentry.infopath_server_url=http://localhost:8080/openmrs1
formentry.queue_dir=formentry/openmrs1/queue
formentry.queue_archive_dir=formentry/openmrs1/archive/%Y/%M
In Malawi we had an issue that caused the creation of duplicate encounters for each form entry. We realized that it was due to the fact that we had multiple instances of OpenMRS running. In our scenario, the form entry queue processor was scheduled on both instances and was looking at the same queue directory. Therefore, both tasks got to the queue at the same time and processed the incoming form entry submissions. We happened to be using the same database instance for each (one was a read-only OpenMRS instance).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)