codejanitor

We accidentally rolled out Mayday & Massmail 3.0 with emailing disabled. If you downloaded either of those two apps in the last 15 hours please re-download the application so that email will work for you. Sorry for the inconvenience.

At Brooks we have a large number of macs on our network. As is customary in large environments, regular users do not have the ability to install software. This has a downside: users can’t receive the automatic software updates released by Apple. However, we discovered that software updates can be run from the command line without any user interaction (well, except for QuickTime which is broken and pops up a registration window — for this reason we exclude it in our script).

Anyhow, we have created a package that makes it easy for other OSX adminstrators to push out automatic software updates. It just creates the following file: /etc/periodic/daily/500.softwareupdates which will run software updates daily (at 3am usually). Download it here.

The FastFrame team is proud to announce the release of version 3.0 of FastFrame and its applications.

Please note: There is database incompatibility between 2.0 and 3.0 for checkout and mayday. By running updatedb_20_to_30.php in the FastFrame/scripts/ directory you can upgrade your database without losing any data.

Highlights of this release include:

FastFrame

• Just the login process can be in ssl while the rest of the session is unencrypted.
• There is now a forgot password link for users with local accounts.
• Users can now have an image associated with their profile.
• Admins can now log in as another user via the profile list page.
• Database structure and queries are less MySQL-centric allowing for greater portability

Checkout

• Any number of files can now be attached to items (i.e. P.Os, licenses, etc.)
• Improved the UI for adding items to a reservation/loan.
• Added Kit Groups. These allow you to have a group of items that always
  go together (i.e. power cord and camera). To reserve them all items in the kit
  have to be available. Upon loan the kit is auto-expanded and all items are
  placed in the loan.
• A detailed history of each reservation/loan is shown when displaying the
  loan/reservation.
• Added a script which will sync the borrowers table with an ldap server (e.g. Active Directory).
• Items marked for removal are no longer removed right away, but instead
  are removed when a loan is actually committed (i.e. all rules have passed).
  This makes the process of converting a loan to a reservation more atomic.

Mayday!

• Several improvements to the mail interface were made so that nearly all features of a Mayday Ticket can be controlled via email (i.e. adding comments, creating ticket, closing ticket, etc.)
• Fixed a security issue where users without correct permissions could see
  the first few lines of a ticket’s description.
• Ticket comments can now be edited.
• A ticket can now have custom fields based on what category the user selects.

Head over to the download area to get them. Or, as always, you can check out the demo to give it a test run.

This version has the following new features:

• It now works in databases other than MySQL (well, I’ve tested it in Postgresql at least)
• It now can check for a newer version of itself and auto-update itself. This allows it to be updated on a large network very easily

Download it here

UPDATE: Checout a screenshot of the end result here.