It's been a while. Well, in internet years, anyway. I've made a lot of updates to jobservice and jobs-admin in the past few weeks:

• service-level settings works
• sporting a new UI
• speed improvements
• tons of bug fixes

I'll let the video do the talking (click the image):

Shoutout to Matthew Paul Thomas who provided the feedback for this new interface. :)

You can see service-level settings in action in the video. It's shown for apport and ufw. There's been a little confusion as to what this actually is, so here's a fancy diagram:

When you click that shiny "Job Settings" button, a lot of things happen. jobs-admin tells jobservice that settings were requested. jobservice then asks each of the backends if they have any settings on that particular service. Then it goes to SLS, which first looks up an XML file, and then uses that data to parse the actual configuration files. This is all compiled together by jobservice and sent back over DBus to jobs-admin, which renders some GTK widgets with this information. When a setting is changed, jobs-admin sends the changes to jobservice, which sends it back to wherever it came from.

SLS doesn't have anything to do with services themselves, just their configuration. When you start, stop, or look up information on a job, that is all handled by the appropriate backend.

Now, there is a PPA somewhere with these changes to play around with, but I won't link it here (though it isn't hard to find). I'd like to get more things together before there's a call for testing, but I won't prevent anyone from using it.

Also: I upgraded this site to Movable Type 5. Let me know if you notice anything broken. :)

So this week I've hit a semi-awesome milestone with jobs-admin and jobservice: service management works!

On a Lucid system you're now able to start and stop not only System V services, but also Upstart 0.6 jobs.

A demo video is available here.

SysV jobs are currently handled using system-tools-backends, though I may look into doing another implementation that doesn't have any external dependencies.

The Upstart 0.6 backend was pretty tricky: Upstart is able to turn the jobs on and off for us, but to disable them we need to edit the config files under /etc/init. It works, though it may need some more through testing to be sure it's all good.

The Upstart 0.10 backend has not been written yet, as 0.10 currently doesn't exist.

Service-level settings still need to be implemented. This will be tricky to do correctly, but I think it will be a valuable feature.

Finally, if you're feeling brave, branch lp:jobservice and lp:jobsadmin to give things a try, though don't expect everything to work as it should. I'll have a PPA ready within a week for testing once things have stabilized.

Released Mound Data Manager 0.4.0 final early this morning, just before the DST switch.

If you have no idea what that is, see this post before reading the rest.

Click the above image for a video.

Main features of this release:

• New UI that shows snapshots on the main window
• Importing/exporting of snapshots
• Translatable

The biggest feature is probably the exporting of snapshots. If you want to quickly take your data to another computer or deploy it to multiple systems, you can now easily do so.

Imported snapshots are checked to make sure that the data matches the application. This means that you can not actually modify the snapshot or Mound will refuse to import it. (Technical details: Mound modifies the gzip header when exported and checks it upon import to prevent importing of any random archive.) You can, however, still extract them like regular tar.gz archives to quickly get your data out or use scripted deployments.

If you're interested, give it a try! It's been fairly well-tested since 0.2, and the snapshot logic has not changed much so your data should still be as safe as it always was.

Launchpad source downloads: https://launchpad.net/mound
PPA: https://launchpad.net/~jpeddicord/+archive/mound (ppa:jpeddicord/mound)

If you're feeling productive, why not help out translating Mound Data Manager into your own language? See Launchpad Translations for more information.

Also, congratulations to Paul Tagliamonte on his new role as the team contact for Ubuntu Ohio! It's been a fun couple of years with the Ohio team, and I'm sure Paul's got the skills to make the Ohio team kick some ass.