[racktables-users] Re: A brand new shiny pre-release is ready to be tested

  • From: Denis Yeldandi <dyeldandi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: racktables-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:31:47 +0300

Hi Frank!

Frank Altpeter wrote:
Not sure (yet) what's with the "Files" tab (do I need to archive documents
on my rack documentation? :), but the history and milestone feature looks
great and usable.
That's another new feature, which is going to be in the same new release with the time-machine. A user would be able to "link" or "attach" files to various objects in the system. Like server photo or router config or anything you can imagine.
One annotation if granted, it looks like the milestone combines all
changes since the last milestone - no matter which logged in user did
these (e.g. two different "admin" users doing changes concurrently are
logged within one milestone). Perhaps it would be an idea to have some
kind of temporary locking button and/or feature to prevent this, otherwise
two admins could do different changes while one of them sends a milestone
entry which contains the other admin's changes as well.
Yep, an excellent question. I was thinking of that and decided that placing locks may lead to problems like somebody has locked the system and went far away and other users will have to forcefully unlock it or ask admin to unlock it or something like that. And then either it would be quite secure, but not easy to use, or it would be easy to use and anyone can unlock and then there is no much sense in locking at all. So I made the "number of changes" button, and it should encourage people to look at that button, check the history of changes and if they see that someone else has already made a change, they would resolve that personally. But, of course, I can be wrong here, and locking is a good feature, and since it's quite experimental yet, I'd like to gather feedback from users, so your suggestion is greatly appreciated indeed. If other people vote for locking as well, or if a good locking mechanism is suggested, or any idea on this shows up, it can be implemented instead of the current model.
Or, perhaps, preventing to log in as an already logged in user, but this
would AFAIK require to get away from AuthType Basic...
Yeah, that's another good question. Generally, it's not recommended to have multiple people using one account, so we may think of enforcing that. The only way I can think of now is using sessions. That however may lead to a problem, when a person works in office, doesn't log out, goes home within some short amount of time, so the session is not expired yet, and tries to work from there and gets "user already logged in" message.
Any ideas on how to fix that?

Oh, just detected a possible bug within the Files section. When looking at
a file (e.g.
http://racktables.org/demo/temporal/?page=file&tab=default&file_id=1 ),
and pressing on the "save changes" button without actually having entered
a new filename on "upload replacement", this gets sent and the file gets
kicked off (e.g. 0 bytes after that).
Excellent spot! That actually revealed another 2 bugs with files. I just fixed all that and updated the demo code. One bug report helped fix 3 bugs, well done!

So far the comments from me,
Thanks a lot, Frank!

Cheers,
Denis.


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