MIRA ASP Features list

This article was first written in May 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/335).

Supported document types

Here is the impressive list of supported document types in the MIRA system.

• e-mails
• Word
• Excel
• PDF
• TIFF
• HTML
• …

Supported input methods

Here is the impressive list of ways of entering documents into the MIRA system.

• IMAP (selecting which folders to get)
• SMTP
• SMB/CIFS (put or get)
• FTP
• Web URL retrieval
• …

Supported languages

Here is a list of supported languages. Those listed languages are supported in every part of the MIRA system (web interface, OCR, online documentation and procedures, …), but more languages already have partial support.

• English
• German
• Spanish
• French

HOWTO Authenticate access to parts of webserver using PAM and Apache

This article is incomplete and was first written in June 2006
for the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/337).

To require authentication of parts of a webserver using PAM and Apache. That way, you can require a user or users of a group to enter a valid username and password to access some parts of your website using PAM, the default authentication infrastructure on most Unices.

To do this, you need first to install the appropriate PAM authentication module for Apache. For Apache 2.x on Debian (starting from Sarge), this is located in the package libapache2-mod-auth-pam.

You need then to add something similar to the definition of you virtual host and reload your Apache daemon:

<Directory /var/www/myrestrictedarea>
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Restricted area for My Server"
        AuthPAM_Enabled On
        Require group mygroup
</Directory>

HOWTO Move a CVS repositoy between servers on Debian

This article was first written in May 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/334).

Basically, moving a CVS repository itself is not really difficult.

Let’s assume first that we don’t use the pserver mode of CVS, which is known to be weak with respect to security. We use then the SSH transport to access the CVS server, which we strongly recommend.

On Debian, the CVS repository is located by default in /var/lib/cvs. At install time, a debconf question asked you where to set it. To check where debconf at least thinks the repository is, look at /etc/cvs-cron.conf. We strongly recommend not to move it afterwards, as all the local CVS repositories (when using SSH mode) on developers’ machine retain this full path.

Make sure CVS is installed on the destination server. Package is called “cvs” and ships both the server and the client.

Now, make sure no developer is going to try to commit anything during the move. Either ask them, cut them SSH access temporarily or whatever suits you best.

Copy the repository /var/lib/cvs to the new server.

Update clients’ local repositories to point to the new server/name if you could not keep it.