As we attempt to test and make the Sodium Agent work on as many operating systems as possible, we realized that we need a way to track status to know what is working, what won't work, what is kind of working and so forth. So here we go.

Sorry for the two week hiatus. As many of you know, there have been some major employment changes in the Quixotic team and, of course, that will have an effect on SodiumSuite. What exactly that effect will be, for better or for worse, will take some time to determine. Our hopes are that once the dust has settled that SS will see an increase in development effort, but it will certainly be a few months before that can be realized. I'll be doing my best to keep everyone abreast of the latest news and status.

Solus Linux lacks a native package for SaltStack and so to use it as a Salt Minion you have to grab the packages from GitHub and create it yourself. Special thanks to @scottalanmiller who looked into this and Exoner4ted in the Solus community who did the research and figured out how to make this work.

Remember to change "saltmastip" to the actual IP of your salt master or handle that however makes sense for you.

cd /tmp; wget https://github.com/saltstack/salt/archive/2018.3.zip
unzip 2018.3.zip; cd /tmp/salt-2018.3/
python /root/salt-2018.3setup.py install
echo "saltmasterip salt" >> /etc/hosts
cp /root/salt-2018.3/pkg/salt-minion.service /usr/lib/systemd/system/
systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl enable salt-minion
eopkg install python-pyzmq pycrypto python-msgpack python-tornado python-jinja pyyaml
systemctl restart salt-minion

Unfortunately this package is not self updating.

We think that the issue was tied to performance. We saw the system being driven really hard, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Our infrastructure upgrade this morning seems to have addressed the issue well.

Yeah, lots of cleaning up needed for the patch system. It is early and mostly works, but leaves a lot to be desired yet

We are working on a design for a patching dashboard that will give a lot more power specifically around patching.

With today's release of SodiumSuite, you will find under an individual asset a tab called "DNS Alternative Info" (this will be renamed to something more obvious shortly) where you can enter individual hosts file entries. Maybe not super exciting as far as features go, but it is the first of our system management utilities being rolled out and we hope shows more of what there is to come.

Right now the management is by individual machine. But we are just in the first stages.

Rolling out changes to the agents deployment page. We are moving from downloads to command line installers. This should make installing far easier for most people. We have a new, single script for UNIX installers, including most Linux, so that you no longer need to track down a different install for each type.

Today's work has been almost exclusively in OS detection and deployments. A lot of progress, though. We are able to support several more kinds of OSes today.

I know that it is very, very early in development and super rough right now, but have you looked at Sodium's SaaS helpdesk option? It is completely free and getting in early lets you be involved in helping to make sure that it has the kinds of features that you need for it to make sense for you.

That's great, thanks for testing that out for us. We also have Windows 7 confirmed as well. So that is 7 and Vista confirmed.

GitLab came back, we are back to development work.

Also updated today, the new main landing page for the SodiumSuite!

https://sodiumsuite.com/

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@kelly said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@quixoticjustin said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@quixoticjustin said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@quixoticjustin said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@kelly said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@QuixoticJeremy @QuixoticJustin Maybe this needs to have its own thread, but how are you funding your tools? I'm always interested in working with new tools, but the world of FOSS is littered with abandonware.

We are funded by a private equity group in Texas that invests in technology-related businesses, primarily. I doubt that we will be going anywhere, we have no venture capital type people to answer to, and our backers have been around for a long time and are just changing their investment style. Traditional VC is churn and burn (build it up, get market, sell it) but ours are long term growth investors - they specialize in building long running businesses focused on revenues years out and make their returns from operational success, not selling to a larger player like California style VC focuses on.

I find the highlighted thing hard/impossible to believe. They might not be leaning on you, but I'm assuming they own enough of the company to make your life difficult at minimum, bad at worse.

Maybe I worded that poorly. I meant that there are NO venture capital people to answer to. Not that the ones we have don't ask for answers. I mean we aren't VC funded, no VCs in site. Because we have no VCs, there are none to answer to at all.

Aww, well then you're either part owners yourself or employees, But I'm assuming there is still a CEO to answer to.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. A CEO is not like a VC. And why would all staff be owners if there aren't VCs? Maybe I'm being unclear, but a VC is an extremely specific type of investor that normal companies do not use. Do you have VCs investing in your workplace that expect to build and sell the company off in just a couple of years? Assuming you don't, does that then make you a part owner of that company?

Well you're stuck on the VC thing - I was more talking about 'people to answer to' part. You have people to answer to, they just aren't VCs. That's true even if the people you're answering to is yourself.

This whole sub-topic came from:

@kelly said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@QuixoticJeremy @QuixoticJustin Maybe this needs to have its own thread, but how are you funding your tools? I'm always interested in working with new tools, but the world of FOSS is littered with abandonware.

Your answer brought in VCs, not his question. So getting back to his question - where does funding come from? If not from VCs, then where?

I'm also curious what tools @Kelly is talking about? Is he talking about you purchasing software to help you make your software? i.e. IDEs (though many are free) or is he talking about who's paying you to make Sodium, or another way to look at it, how are you surviving financially while making this? Which we already know the answer to that second part - you still have a full time day job. You're writing Sodium on your own time after hours. So other than hosting, I'm wondering what expenses you have? Considering the people involved, I'd be very surprised if the entire thing isn't being written in FOSS solutions to keep you out of any lock-in.

I was curious about their business model to keep the products moving forward when they're free and hosted. Those two are much harder to combine and be at least revenue neutral.

Things like this are typically either using Ads or selling data (or both) to earn revenue.

We've been talking about being ad supported from the beginning. @QuixoticJeremy in one of his posts from last week talked about how the space is left on the right hand side for ad placement. That's been the plan from day one.

Added Mac OS 10.12 as now working!

Stay safe, everyone!

@wrx7m said in Ticketing Solutions for IT Department:

@quixoticjustin said in Ticketing Solutions for IT Department:

I know that it is very, very early in development and super rough right now, but have you looked at Sodium's SaaS helpdesk option? It is completely free and getting in early lets you be involved in helping to make sure that it has the kinds of features that you need for it to make sense for you.

I am interested in it but, like you said, it is still very early. I need something to use that is polished but also still going to be actively developed/improved.

Polished we can't offer yet, but active... you won't find anything more active than Sodium. We are doing several releases per day, did one today already. I expect at least one more this evening, if not more. It's a big project that is moving really quickly. Lots of great new features showing up regularly.

Since we can't look at system updates tonight while GitLab is down. Or at least not as we normally do, we are talking the time to test some new stuff. We have CentOS 6 in the system now.

Azure Storage (is that Storage Spaces Direct that they run on?) is what failed and has been down for hours. They've finally figured out that their storage failed, but have no estimate for getting it back. GitLab is now totally down indefinitely.

You need to pour some 99 Blackberries in there. Dewberry Juice for the win.

As the Sodium project continues to gain steam, our current focus is getting a ground breaking helpdesk and ticketing component out the door. We have some goals of our own, but we don't want to be designing in a vacuum, either. What features do you like from other systems. What don't you like. What do you wish was out there but you can't find? What would make for the most amazing helpdesk and ticketing platform of all time?