Community member Nathaniel McCallum’s provided instructions for making Zenoss use LDAP or ActiveDirectory for Authentication and Authorization recently had a very important update from Scott Haskell. Users were reporting very slow UI response times and Scott narrowed it down to those installations using LDAP. He tracked down the Zope RAM Cache Manager and updated the documentation on how to greatly improve performance:

Enabling Caching

LDAPMultiPlugins has the ability to cache expensive LDAP look-ups and other operations. This ability, however, is not enabled by default. To enable caching:

• Login to the ZMI (Zope Management Interface) at http://servername:8080/zport/manage
• Click on ‘acl_users(PAS)’ from the center pane or the top-level ‘acl_users’ from the left navigation pane
• From the drop-down list in the upper right, select ‘RAM Cache Manager’ and click add.
• Give the RAM Cache Object a name; e.g. - LDAP Cache
• Click on the newly created object to configure it
• Tweak the properties as needed
• Click on the ‘Associate’ tab
• Click ‘Locate’
• Your LDAPMultiPlugins object (whatever you named it) and userManager will appear as objects that you can associate with the RAM Cache.
• Check your LDAPMultiPlugin object and select ‘Save Changes’.

Caching is now enabled for LDAP.

Scott went even further and documented his debugging and troubleshooting of the problem. Thanks again to Scott for this great tip!

Tags: Community, ldap, tip, Zenoss, Zope

This is probably going to be my last post to the Zenoss Blog, seeing as how I’ve only got 2 weeks left on my contract, but I wanted to take the time to shout out to Henrik Just and writer2LaTeX. Henrik’s software, which is now also integrated into OpenOffice, is fantastic. The last big project I worked on for Zenoss was the OpenOffice (.sxw) to Plone converter for the HTML-ization of the Zenoss Guide. The purpose of generating an HTML version, split by section, was to

• provide an easily accessible on-line version (non-OpenOffice, non-PDF)
• have multiple versions of the Guide be searchable
• provide users with the utility of being able to comment on each section of the guide

There was XML-wrangling, HTML post-processing, and Plone content type generation involved — lots of moving parts. At times, we ran into issues such as Java problems (what writer2LaTeX is written in) or obscure/hidden formatting issues in our source document. Other times, we needed specific features that weren’t in writer2LaTeX.

Enter Henrik: he helped us out a great deal, not only by discovering the root issues of several of our problems, but in addition addressed the features we needed with instant patches. He and I worked together to test these features and make sure everything was running as expected. His responses and contributions ended up saving Zenoss big $ and me big time. Thanks again, Henrik!

Nathan, has a nice tidbit on running Zenoss over SSL on his blog:

Since Zenoss runs inside of Zope, you have to do a couple of things to get it to run over ssl. There are zope plugins, and perhaps there is another way that Zenoss would recommend, but I have never been one for reading when I can stomp full speed ahead

Does anyone else have Zenoss running over SSL? If so, what’s your recipe?

Well, not really. But it if did, it’s okay by me: I really like LDAP. I’ve only had to work with it a little bit in the past, but I have been in deep LDAP immersion for the past 2 months. The thing that really pi**es me off is PHP. Now, that crap DID eat my damn brainz. Fortunately, I was able to do most of the work in python.

This was all for the first draft of http://community.zenoss.com. We were initially just trying to get a mailman-to-forums bridge up, but we needed to integrate with LDAP for our future user management plans. THEN, we found out that the forum software was read-only for LDAP, so users couldn’t manage their data. Thus enter Plone, one phase earlier than planned.

Needless to say, it has been quite an adventure. And minus the PHP, it’s been most enjoyable, if tiring. There are some very cool upshots, though: I will most likely (given the time) 1) be writing a Plone 2.5 + PAS + LDAP HowTo, and 2) writing a Zenoss LDAP HowTo.

But right now, I’m gonna go play some WoW. It’s not like I’ve got any brainz left to worry about…