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.

Many Thanks

> 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.

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had a solution for my problem.
We are trying to run several books on one server. The books are grouped 
such as follows :

Group Users1 = Book1, Book2, Book3
Group Users2 = Book4, Book5, Book6
Group Users3 = Book7, Book8, Book9

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?

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)?

Tomas

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

> 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.

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?

Justin

> source of it. The reply/attachment bug is fixed, and a warning about 
> exceeding the number of attachments will come soon.

> Actually my report was NOT about this limitation. You have it - it is fine.
> The problem is that I add some 'zombies' or dead files to my logbook.
> 
> BTW is there a tool to check the 'integrity' of a logbook? That all
> attachments are in place,  there are no dead files, etc. I perfectly
> understand that it is not _highly_ desired or needed, but with the two last
> problems (auto-removing of attached files and silent adding a new ones with
> 20+ attachments) I have doubts that our logbook in a good state. And we 
just
> started to use it. And I am still so excited about it!!

Actually my philosophy is not to cure symptoms of a problem, but fix the 
source of it. The reply/attachment bug is fixed, and a warning about 
exceeding the number of attachments will come soon.

About the integrity, there is no problem. As you might know, the xxxxxxa.log 
files are plain text files. The line "Attachments: xxx" contains a simple 
text list of all attachments. In the above case a few files might be missing 
in that line, but they are present in the log directory. So in worst case 
edit the xxxxxxa.log file manually, adding the file names, and maybe restart 
elogd to rebuild the index properly. Otherwise there is no integrity problem.

> We use ELOG 2.3.5 for Windows with a German language file and have found 
> some new problems:
>
> . Certain strings are not translated.

That has been fixed in meantime.

> . If a user uses the new "password forgotten" function, he receives an 
> email, but after having clicked the URL in the mail, he gets the following 
> error message as simple text, i.e. not formatted by use of the CSS file:
> 
> Invalid URL: Notizen/?redir=%3Fcmd%3DChange%20password%26old_pwd%
> 3DE3ARcjI/&uname=sal&upassword=E3ARcjI/ 

Have you tried the elogd.cfg setting:

[global]
URL = http://your.host/

it might help there.

> . If one could not log in through the button "Login", one does not receive 
> an error message, but will be pushed simply back to the main page, 
> status "Not logged in". (This was as far as we know was also with earlier 
> versions of ELOG.)

You should at least receive a login page. So does this push back occur on a 
wrong username there or how does it happen?

> . If you want to change as an admin the passwords of several users, it 
> would be convenient, to get always back to the page, where you may choose 
> the next user ... but you will be pushed back to the main page with the 
> messages. (This was as far as we know was also with earlier versions of 
> ELOG.)

Agree. Will work on that.

> . But the simple change of passwords for users does not always succeed: I 
> have changed the password for a user A to "anuvis", the next user B should 
> have gotten the same new password, but this time it was not accepted. 
> Message "Wrong password". Might it be, that this goes only once because of 
> an initialisation problem ? I had to edit the password file manually.

Can you reproduce the problem? If so, tell me the exact sequence of thing 
you do and I can try to reproduce it as well, then fix it.

> . Opera browser 7.03 simply crashes, when choosing the direct URL to our 
> logbook, i.e. http://localhost:8080/logbook2. We have set a general 
> password file and a different read password for each of our logbooks.
> If we choose http://localhost:8080/logbook1 everything is fine. We get a 
> window "Authentication required" and type in simply the read password, no 
> user name.

Wow, your browser crashes? Funny, I never had that. So what does the browser 
say?

> If we choose http://localhost:8080/logbook2 the behaviour is different. We 
> see the window "Authentication required" appear, then Opera crashes.
> Change of the read passwords did not change this erroneous behaviour. This 
> problem was not with version ELOG 2.3.4.

I will try to install 7.03 and reproduce this, might take some while...

> . NOWRAP tag in Date column
> The date column takes quite a lot of space in the logs overview. As the 
> information is only of secondary importance I would prefer date and time 
> being wrapped like e.g. the contributors name. Of course, I could help 
> myself with a 
 in my language file, but this would force a break also 
on 
> the single message view.

Something like

Date format = %B %d, %Y

in your configuration file reduces the date string length considerably.