Dear ELOG users,

this is to announce an important security update. As proposed by Lukasz Olejnik (CERN/PSNC), ELOG has now switched to strong encryption of password. So everybody concerned in security is advised to update to the new version 2.8.0. Existing password files for Windows users and Linux users not using HAVE_CRYPT are automatically converted. Those installations which used HAVE_CRYPT in the past under Linux have to ask their users to re-enter their password (via the link "Forgot password") after the upgrade to version 2.8.0.

Best regards,

  Stefan Ritt

Hi, I rsync an elog database from CERN to TRIUMF every few months and I notice that rsync keeps copying preview files (xxx.png.png, xxx.gif.png, etc) from very old entries. I guess that elogd creates these files from scratch each time they are needed, overwriting any previously existing preview files. This creates extra rsync network traffic and rsync takes longer to complete. Is there any way to avoid this? K.O.

I just realized that the command line elog utility did not yet use the new encryption. So automatic elog submissions using passwords are broken in version 2.8.0. I made an intermediate version 2.8.0-2 which fixes that. However you only need to update it if you use the elog utility and have problems with the 2.8.0 version.

Actually the thumbnail files are only created if they are not there. This is done in the function crate_thumbnail():

   i = get_thumb_name(file_name, str, sizeof(str), 0);

   if (i)

      return i;

So if these files are recreated always, something must be wrong there. Or you sysadmin runs a cron job which deletes them every evening 

We have been experiencing corruption of logbook entries by elogd mirror synchronization. Has anyone else encountered this? Is there a known cause and/or workaround for it?

Details

We have two elog servers set up with identical elogd.cfg and password files, except that one server has "Mirror server" pointing to the other host. There are three logbooks defined.  (Their names are DoubleChooz, BigBrotherTable, and FlushingTable.)  When the mirror synchronization happens, whether by "Mirror cron" or by an administrator hitting the "Synchronize all logbooks" link, it often happens that entries requiring synchronization are corrupted on both servers (not just the one to which the entry was copied). This is particularly likely to happen if entries have been made on both servers since the previous sync.

Looking at the logbook files themselves, we see that the corrupted entries will have attributes from the wrong logbooks. E.g., we'll see an empty "Barometer: " line in a DoubleChooz logbook file, where "Barometer" is an attribute that is only in the FlushingTable logbook, or we will see there are unexpected DoubleChooz logbook attributes in the FlushingTable files.

Strangely, the entries will not be identical on the two machines after syncing, and they stay non-identical on further syncs.

Most disturbingly, data is lost from entries that were perfectly valid before the sync, on both servers.

This was happening with elogd 2.7.8, and continued to happen after upgrading to 2.8.0. Both servers are running Linux. One is a 32-bit machine and another 64-bit, in case that might matter (but read on).

I made copies of both servers' files and ran two elogd servers on my Mac on different ports, compiled from a fresh checkout of 2.8.0, and the same behavior was observed as I repeatedly made test entries and synchronized.  This suggests it isn't specific to Linux architecture, 64-bit or otherwise.

We plan to use ELOG with mirror servers in a larger scale here, so I'm interested to know more about your problem.

Could you boil down your configuration to a minimum that still allows a reproduction of the problem and post those configurations as attachments?

Then I would try to reproduce it here. Best case I'll find a bug fix, worst case I'll reconsider the use of mirror servers ;-)

 I have been using the mirror mechanism for one year for the online T2K /ND280 (neutrino oscillation experiment at J-PARC, Japan).  It has been a savior to allow access to all collaborators to the Elog.  The experiment online computers are all behind a double firewall that allow only communication through ssh and http in one direction: from the inside to the outside. The master Elog is located in Canada and accessible remotely to all collaborators.  The mirror Elog is located inside the firewall on one of the online machines in Japan and synchronization is setup to run automatically every 5 minutes. There are 10 logbooks defined for each of the sub-detector groups.

At first I encountered a big problem when messages were added on both sides.  It turned out that Elog mirroring does not work when the two instances are running on different time zones. After I set the machine in Canada to run on Japan time (JST), no further problems have happened. Postings are routinely entered on either of the Elogs and synchronization works well.  This feature is essential to having a workable Elog for the T2K experiment. 

I had reported the problem of timezones to Stefan last year. He was going to put it on his wish list.

I recently upgraded elog from 2.7.8 to 2.8.0 (and moved servers, removed unused logbooks, etc.). I'm now having a problem where elog consistently crashes when attempting to edit multiple entries. This is a very common use case, as we use a "status" field, set to "open" or "closed" to track problems. When a problem is resolved, we will go to the "list" display, set it to "threaded", "select" the thread, and then edit it, to change the status field for all posts in the thread to "closed".

Now, as soon as the "edit" button is clicked, elog crashes. This happens on every thread and logbook that I've tried. The elog logfile itself doesn't show anything useful.

However, if eLog is run with "-v" in place of "-D", it does not crash.

Environment:

        CentOS 5.4

        eLog 2.8.0 built Aug  5 2010, 12:24:11