Rudy's personal scratchpad - PyDS 2004/4

I'm running 2 instances of PyDS as a Windows service now.

I wanted to use PyDS for some of my other hobbies too and I didn't want to mix with this instance. I prefer to use this one only for computer related things. I guess I'll move the jokes too.

There were 2 problems I had to take care of: the location of the data files on my laptop and the serverport.

The serverport could easily be configured in %PYDS_HOME%etcPyDSConfig.py but I found it to be easier adding one line to pandora-start.py.

PyDS first looks for the PYDS_HOME environment variable to find the location of its homedir. If it isn't found, it looks for HOME. On Windows, if that failes also it uses:

home = os.environ['HOMEDRIVE'] + os.environ['HOMEPATH'] 

The problem here is that you can only specify one location. The solution was to set the PYDS_HOME environment variable in pandora-start.py as you can see below:

import sys
import getopt
import os

os.environ['PYDS_HOME'] = r"G:\PyDS\Pandora"

import PyDS.ConfigLoader

_PyDS.serverport = 4335

import PyDS.Context
import PyDS.Translation

print _("Loading desktop server ...")

import PyDS.Server

(opts, args) = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], 'fved')

for o in opts:
    if o[0] == '-f':
        _PyDS.daemon = 0
    elif o[0] == '-v':
        _PyDS.verbose = 1
    elif o[0] == '-e':
        _PyDS.echoLog = 1
    elif o[0] == '-d':
        import libwadpy

PyDS.Server.start_server(daemon=_PyDS.daemon)

Test 2 : a backtrack of my own article

Testing backtraq

How far can you go in customizing PyDS?

Just some things I'd have to find out:

• Can you configure different "categories" of Pictures? Or, how would I separate the pictures from my last trip to Italy and those of my daughter's birthday party?
• Is it possible to have different style-sheets per Category. Can I have comments and backtracks enabled for one and disabled for another category?
• Can I have different upstream settings per category? The normal text ones to PyCS and the photos via FTP to my iSP webspace? Or should I try to have two instances of PyDS running at different ports?
• Can I easily extend PyDS to fetch my email from my POP server?

Need to solve the proxy problem (not only for PyDS)

First of all I'll explain why I have a problem with proxies. When I'm working at home I could use the ISP's proxyserver but I don't need to. When I'm working at the office I MUST use a proxyserver, but which one depends on the location. Fortunatley my company provides an autoproxy configuration script. When I'm working on a customer's LAN it all depends. Some do not allow Internet access, other don't need proxy servers, some have a fixed proxyserver and only a few use autoconfig scripts.

The problem I'm facing now is that I don't have a solution for all situations.

I've been looking at how urllib.py determines which proxy server it should use for which protocol, and I can't say I'm happy about it. The getproxies function first looks if there are environment variables of the form protocol_proxy (e.g. http_proxy) and uses those if found. If not, it looks in the Windows registry (HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings) for ProxyEnable and ProxyServer.

Because I'm running PyDS as a service (as LocalSystem) (thanks to Georg) now, I not even sure which user is used in the registry (certainly not myself). I could run the service under my own accoutn and have that problem solved, but then I shouldn't forget to go and change the password for the service each time I renew mine. The environment variables are problematic too because Localsystem only sees changes at the next reboot. Changing to my useraccount would mean that I would need to restart the service every time the proxy settings change.

So, suppose I change the sevice account for PyDS into mine, I would still have a problem because in some of the situations I'd have to use a autoproxy configscript in which case I'd have to clear the ProxyEnable registry setting. I'll have to think about this one.

I change networks at least 3 times a day when working and I almost never reboot my laptop. This brings me to the next challenge: changing the proxy settings automagically. Now, that shouldn't be too hard. I can create a configuration table containing the correct proxy settings for each network I'm on ( combination of IP-range and domainname). I could write a PyDS-tool that checks the network every minute (shoudn't be that hard) and then changes the proxy settings according to the network I'm on at that moment.