> I've been using elog for several months now, and one thing that's always
> seemed odd to me are the things like max number of attachments and max
> attachment size are defined right in the source code, and not in the config
> file.  It would seem that it would be simple to be able to define stuff like
> that in the config file (and have defaults in case they weren't specified),
> which would fix a lot of the recompiling problems - just edit the config 
file
> and restart elog.  Not that recompiling elog is difficult, it just seems 
like
> recompiling for such a simple setting is overkill...
> 
> Anyway, just curious.  Is there a technical reason this is not done?

The max attachment size I was able to not only make configurable, but to make 
dynamically. So if there is a very large attachment, the size is dynamically 
extended as long as there is RAM. The max number of attachments is not easy 
to change, since it's used internally as an array size, which has to be 
determined at compile time. Making this dynamically would require a major 
rework, which of course could be done, but it might be that there are more 
urgent requests.

Today I found out that Apache 1.3.23 (and probably 1.3.24) has a problem 
with ELOG if used as a proxy server. Due to a bug in Apache, only one 
cookie is transmitted through the proxy at a time. This makes it impossible 
to log in into ELOG with user name and password (requires two cookies). 
Apache 1.3.23 comes with RedHat 7.3 for example.

To solve the problem, update Apache to 1.3.27.

See also http://bugs.apache.org/index.cgi/full/9655

> We would like to give access to selected users to only their Group. So that 
> for instance Users1 cannot access the books of group Users3. I was 
> wondering if there is any notion of "User profile" or security per logbook 
> Group implemented?

No, groups of users are not yet implemented, but it's on the wishlist and I 
added your vote for this item.

> What we do for now is that we have 3 different PASSELOG files and for each 
> Book we need to specify which PASSELOG should be used for authentication. 
> This works fine except that we prefer that users do not see the other 
> logbooks listed in the main menu nor the other "inaccessible" logbook tabs 
> in the logbook view. Is there a way to hide these for them (but only for 
> them)?

A (poor man's) work-around right now is to run three instances of elogd on 
three different ports, then use Apache as a proxy. I do this in this server 
for example. Under http://midas.psi.ch/elogdemo you see the public logbooks, 
while under http://midas.psi.ch/megelog you see some logbooks from an 
experiment here at our institute. The access control is completely separated, 
and you don't see the logbook tabs from the other group as well.

> We are using elog as a small database system, today we came across a 
> problem where 2 people were editing the same record and the first one to 
> submit his changes were overwritten when the second person submitted his.
> 
> Is there anyway to lock a logbook record when someone has pressed EDIT, 
> maybe set a flag in the logbook entry so it has to be unlocked when its 
> submitted by the originator or by an administrator.

No, but I will put it on the wishlist. Anyhow it is hard to implement 
something like this. Assume that I would lock a page whenever it's edited 
by 
someone. This person can edit it and forget to submit the changes, just 
close 
the browser. Since the elogd server does not know when a remote browser is 
closed, it cannot determine if the editing is just taking long or if the 
person closed the browser. In the latter case, the message would be locked 
forever and nobody could change it any more. If I put a timeout, like keep 
locked for N minutes, it's again not 100% safe. I saw people doing shift 
work 
with elog, opening a page, keeping it open for 8 hours and then submit it. 
So 
if I set the timeout to 8h, and someone abandons editing a message, this 
message would be blocked for 8h, which is probably also not what you want. 

Alternatively, I just can display a messge: Warning: this message is 
currently edited by user xxx on host xxx. But if the warning is ignored by 
the user, then again we have the same problem.

Do you see a clever solution to that?

> Is there a way to simulate an ELOG SUBMIT?

Have a look at the elog utility which comes in the package. It does exactly 
this. It "simulates" a browser and does a submit directly to elogd. So you 
can either redo the elog code somewhere, or call elog with the proper 
command line parameters to insert logbook entries.

> Let's share some inspiration. I'll post mine as soon as finished the re-
> look.

Excellent idea. I added a category "CSS File" in the logbook "Config 
Examples" next to this forum. You can login with the same user name and 
password as for this forum. As an example, I posted the new CSS file. Please 
note that one need small changes in elogd.c to accomodate for the new 3D 
look (basically don't display lines between cells), so it won't work very 
nice with pre-2.3.7.

So everybody is invited to post his favourite CSS files an icons there. 
Maybe we can even make a competition about the nicest ELOG icon...

> Can anyone tell me the URL for the CVS download section
> 
> the link has gone from one of the main screens
> 
> Cheers

The message stating the URL is still in this forum: elog:233

> 
> missing '.' in emails
> -----------------------
> 
> A dot '.' at the beginning of a line is not transmitted via email.
> It is stored in the entry properly though.
> 
> Test:
> ./There is a dot just before '/There...'
> 
> Greetings, Heiko

Here is what I got as email:

Test:
./There is a dot just before '/There...'

So I guess you mean ONLY a dot at the beginning of the line. In the email 
SMTP protocol, at lonely dot at the beginning of the line means "end of 
message" and the mail server stops by that. I checked my mail program and 
found out that it converts a single dot into two dots at the beginning of the 
line. I have to implement this in elgod.c. Thanks for pointing out this 
problem.