Dear piler-users,
I've just released 0.1.25-rc1, a release candidate before the final
version.
This version includes several bug fixes, and improvements. The only
new feature I can think of is a 2 factor authentication (2FA) to
harden the gui. It can be enabled in the user settings menu, and it
requires the Google Authenticator app (available for eg. Android).
An sms verification code could be possible as well, however it requires
a paid service from an sms gateway provider (and some development
within
the piler gui). If you need such a feature, then let me know, and it
can
be developed in exchange of some donations to the project.
I've also removed the audio part of the securimage captcha. It wasn't
enabled by default, and made the tarball 8 MB less.
I also encountered some issues presented by encrypted attachments. In
our
network encrypted attachments are banned, since some spammers or
scammers
try to hide their crap in encrypted zip files to fool antivirus
products.
However if the parser encountered an encrypted zip file, then it
couldn't
properly extract its paylod, instead it waits indefinitely. The rc
version
solves this issue by simply skipping and not indexing the encrypted
part.
The other problem I saw is damaged pdf attachments. I tried several
versions
of the pdftotext utility, and I had little success with getting the
text
out of the broken pdf file. The problem is that the parser calls
pdftotext
which hangs, thus making the parser itself to hang as well. The
effective
solution would be a fix in the pdftotext utility to bail out, and
provide
an error message, etc. Until then piler features a workaround to use
the
timeout utility. Instead of calling "pdftotext aaa.pdf", we call the
following:
"timeout 10 pdftotext aaa.pdf", and in this case the timeout utility
makes
sure that pdftotext is terminated after 10 seconds even if it fails.
To activate the timeout feature add the "--with-plugin-timeout=N"
configure
option. "N" is the seconds to timeout. Note that you should carefully
set
this number, and give enough time to the helper programs to complete
(since
this workaround applies to all external program used by the parser).
The upgrade procedure is rather simple: execute the following command:
mysql -u piler -p piler < util/db-upgrade-0.1.24-vs-0.1.25.sql
Then the usual ./configure .... && make && sudo make install
You can get the rc version from bitbucket:
https://bitbucket.org/jsuto/piler/downloads/piler-0.1.25-rc1.tar.gz
sha256:
e617dc60e013286246f58ee079e3385a3c6e3be322a78320c60569739ee2d86d
In the past when someone reported a bug, then I fixed it, then pushed
the
fix to the master branch, and I suggested that please upgrade.
Sometimes
it may not be a desired action. So I've decided to provide "service
packs"
to the final 0.1.25 for some time, and you are not forced to embrace
other
changes in the code as well, eg. 0.1.25-sp1, 0.1.25-sp2, etc. Applying
such
a service pack won't require any database scheme updates, nor other
changed
code besides the fix. I'm not sure how long to provide such service
packs
to 0.1.25, I can imagine for a year or so, I'll try to match your
needs.
Some of you demand for supporting different operating systems, eg.
freebsd,
solaris, etc, and different database engines, eg. postgresql.
Unfortunately
they are not on the agenda at the moment, and currently I think of
piler
to be built on some well defined components, eg. Linux, mysql, etc.
When the last time I saw the download counters for piler I was
impressed with
the numbers: almost 3000 downloads (OVA appliance + tarball) for
0.1.24.
Amazing, thanks for your interest and support in piler.
Best regards,
Janos
