toksta*

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.

It’s now possible to easily integrate the toksta instant messenger into your elgg based community. To get your script just register at toksta.com and go to the “implementation” area (”create script”) of our backend.

We’ve tested this with elgg 1.2. Please tell us if you discover any problems with different versions.

Tags: elgg, integration, toksta

During our Valley trip we had the chance to visit many cool start-ups (well, some of them I wouldn’t consider as startups any more… Among them were Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo!

@ Yahoo, Tom Hughes-Croucher sat down with Michael Gloess and held a little video interview. You can see the outcome below. Enjoy!

Tags: silicon valley, toksta, video, yahoo!

Because we didn’t find a server monitoring tool, that fit all of our needs, our System Administrator Frank (think of him as Oliver Kahn for the world of System Administration) developed a Perl-based web-Interface for our platform. Of course we could have used several different tools to get the same functionality, but a single interface is just much more comfortable.

toksta* Server Monitoring (tsm) is designed for developers to keep an eye on the Servers and for System Administrators to see important logfiles, statistics and additional system information in one single interface.

As a special feature an interface for Subversion is implemented, so we can do checkouts from our version control to all webservers in a single operation. All remote operations on the servers are done by commands via SSH, so we can implement each command execution on our servers with only some short lines of Perl. But it’s not only a webinterface: Additionally to that it contains a tool named ‘tsm_cron’ for running tasks on your servers like backing up directories and databases, generating performance graphs, checking MD5 sums of important files etc.

Because this tool may be useful for other platforms with replicated MySQL databases and multiple webservers and some code snippets also may be useful for usage in modules for Nagios, we released this tool as an open-source software. Informations about the project and a download of the first alpha- release is available at Sourceforge.net.

At the moment the following features are implemented:

• monitoring of MySQL replication
• MySQL process lists and settings
• process monitoring with Monit
• file alteration monitoring
• logviewer for different logs like webserver logfiles, backup logs etc.
• performance monitoring graphs
• Subversion checkout interface for checkouts to multiple servers
• Memcache monitoring

We plan to implement additional functions like:

• user management to allow users access to specific modules
• service restarts on all servers
• terminal for shell access
• monitoring of running processes on servers
• Subversion checkouts for single files
• adding, modifying and deleting virtual hosts on webservers
• runtime changing of MySQL settings
• firewall interface (adding and deleting rules etc)
• adding, modifying and deleting cronjobs
• restart of entire replicated MySQL system

The development status is still alpha, but feature requests and help on development are very welcome! A documentation for implementing toksta* Server Monitoring into your platform is coming with our next release.

If you like the software please send your Feedback directly to Frank or leave comment and support toksta by spreading the word!

Tags: Oliver Kahn, Perl, server monitoring, toksta

Hey folks, as you can see, not only the blog-design has changed: From now on we will write this blog in English! It might be a little less comfortable for you to read but it is also less comfortable for us to write

We made this decision because we start to get (yet very little) international attention. I have received mails asking about our tokstsa* instant messenger from Spain, Turkey, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. And even though we don’t even have a language version for any of these countries, we would like to keep everybody (and of course potential customers) up to date. And writing several blogs in different languages…come on! So please don’t count spelling errors or sometimes funny expressions – they come for free and you can keep them if you want to

Tags: toksta