Dec 16 2005 4:41pm von michaelebrown
Betreff: Would like to port Citadel to the NSLU2 - ignore blank mesg
Anyone, I'd like to port Citadel to the NSLU2, but would like some guidance as how to start.
In general i would say, no real 'porting' is needed, because of citadel runs for example on Sparc architecture too.
You can read more about the NSLU2 at my website
http://bytered.com/siteinfo.html
And,at the NSLU2 Wiki site http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
The NSLU2 is a very small single board computer, 133MHz and 32MB of memory, sold by LinkSys as a network storage device. It can be overclockedto 266MHz, and you can also (if you're good at soldering) upgrade memory.
The NSLU2 has been hacked for over a year now, and a huge number of applications have been ported to the NSLU2, and is soon(hopefully) to have a Debian OS port. My contributions have centered around the existing thttpd installation and configuration, and native development on the NSLU2.
I personally like the openwrt packaging for embedded system. did you have a look at that? it aims to be debian alike. btw, The debian scripts you can find in the debian/ dirs are my work.
I'm now shifting my attentionto mail, webmail, and other forms of community collaboration. I've been reviewing Postfix, qmail, Sendmail, Exim as potential SMTP agents, and I came across Citadel on WikiPedia. It's much more than Iwas searching for, but seems to solve mail transfer as well many other items on my shopping list.
Most of the open solutions available entail a very long list of required supporting software. Forexample, before you can use SquirrelMail, you need to install Apache, Php, Sendmail (or other), and the list goes on... ending up with a huge list of processes. Hence, Citadel...
Taken from the top of my athlon:
The Citadel server itself: (data storage, services smtp, pop3, imap, citadel
25496 citadel 18 0 13852 4596 2784 S 0.0 0.9 3:44.34 citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:993 0.0.0.0:* ; LISTEN 25496/citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:995 &n bsp; 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 25496/citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:587 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 25496/citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:110 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 25496/citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:143 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 25496/citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:465 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 25496/citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:504 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 25496/citserver
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:25 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 25496/citserver
Webcit: Provides a webserver, so you probably wouldn't need thttpd anymore. primary issue would be embedding the management scripts here.
5363 root 15 0 18760 2388 1396 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.10 webserver
Here's a few questionsthat I'd appreciate some help with...
The Citadel website mentioned a need for a minimum of 64MB for the software. How serious is this need? Can Citadel be configured to have less impact on memory?(Note: Some people have actually gotten Apache to run on the NSLU2, but I hear lots of concern of performance (totally expected), which is why I stayed with thttpd and it's small footprint.)
citadel uses the Sleepy Cat database engine as backend storage. so it' memory hunger will depend on the number of users and data stored by them.
TheNSLU2 does not have a video controller, and as such, is typically used in a "server" capacity. It appears that to me that Citadel could run on the NSLU2, and I would use the web interface fromFireFox on my PC to access Citadel on the NSLU2. Is this correct?
yep. almost any configuration (aside of that needed to get the services up) may be changed from within webcit.
Are there ways to build Citadel incrementally? And therefore provide a more usable footprint for this small machine. For example,only include the mail and chat facilities... ?
you can abbandon calendaring features by not providing ical. allso you could allso drop ldap support, and localization to safe space.
Many of the people that are now setting up their NSLU2s are more inexperienced than before, and they are severely confounded by an email installation.Citadel appears to be *much* easier to install and maintain. Am I correct in that? Does anyone have real-life experiences to share?
yep. you can default configure citadel by environment variables to the setup program, so you can use values for the situation in your box apropriate, and do all the other stuff, domain name etc. from the web frontend.
I couldn't find the Citadel sources, have they been moved? Arethere detailed instructions on how to checkout the source using Eclipse?
svn is used to manage the citadel sources. see www.citadel.org the download section.
Thanks to everyone for taking time to provide me with feedback.
P.S. Citadel looks awesome!
it is ;-)
P.P.S. Anyoneknow of a challenging job in the northeast Atlanta area? I'm in the job market.
Mike
http://bytered.com/
-- "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.Imagination encircles the world." - Albert Einstein
- [Citadel Development] Re:Would like to port Citadel to the NSLU2... dothebart
