I've taken something of a large machette to the code and stripped everything to do with the group model leaving with just one set of user code for my role based memory model. There is a lot of information on how and why the role model was important, and that is all I have been testing since namespace was moved into bitweaver, so simply culling unused code made sense. The result is a lot more compact setup at least for the users package and just one style of memory handling to worry about. 20 years ago what I should have done is simply cloned the users module and built an alternative, and then fixed everything else by a simple switch between group and role ... hindsight is a wonderful thing! Having tidied everything up and mass hit all the php8.5 style issues using php-somthing I've now got to a point where I can start hitting some of the longstanding niggles in bitweaver's operations.

One long time niggle has been that {code} blocks were not working, and with Claude Code's help that was polished off in no time, and although it is still clunky, even ckeditor can cope with it. 

We have logged a useful todo list
Completed:
✅ Second 8TB SAS disk installed smoothly  -> ASR-5405Z Configuration Notes
✅ cgit working on git.rdm1.uk -> Fun with cgit and cgi services in general
✅ fcgiwrap .socket -> .sock fix restoring lsces.uk cgi
✅ auth_basic working cleanly on subdomain
✅ webstack commits to tidy up -> Webstack - Server Configuration Management
Soon:
⬜ VSCode Remote-SSH setup
⬜ Development repos on srv10 -> sorted in the crib sheet above - have to keep everything on the one level, so the packages in /bitweaver get linked direct to /srv/git
⬜ cgitrc sections for repo grouping -> sorted in the crib sheet above
⬜ srv9 pull latest webstack commits -> which actually worked perfectly to bring srv9 in line with srv10
⬜ desktop webstack setup

Longer:
⬜ BitThemes APCu duplicate css/js bug
⬜ Smarty {code} / ckeditor fix
⬜ dhparams.pem consolidation -> Done on both machines ;)
⬜ acme.sh renewal niggles -> duff entry in config file, but next step is to drop the older style certs and just use the ecc ones.
⬜ mapserv on lsces.uk
⬜ Health dashboard in Firebird/PHP
⬜ MERG parts management
⬜ Historic map viewer (Leaflet)
⬜ wordpress_hacks.conf refinement

Just to add to the fun, I messed up and did a zypper dup on the main server before having triald it on the backup machine ... No warning we now have PHP8.5.5 after PHP8.4.20 and of cause nothing is included for firebird/interbase! So all the sites go down. The good news is that the whole point of the webstack exercise was to ensure that the the backup machine was in sync with the main server and EVERYTHING had been synced so that srv9 is running perfectly while srv10 is tits up, so hook up the the router and switch the two machine so 443 is served by srv9 and 8443 by srv10. So I can edit this blog happily and it's working fine.

arcconf is available from Microchip although the links provided by both Sonnet4.6 and duckduckgo search no longer exist. I eventually found it's now location, or rather locations as the more recent V4 version seemed not to work, while the V3 version gave a help menu however said there were no controllers. I did a cold reboot, and magically arcconf V3 reported a controller and showed the attached disk. Fairly quickly this morning we worked through the steps and got the drive attached finally using jbod mode to create /dev/sde. A little hold-up as I was waiting on yast/partitioner formatting the disk, only to realise that it was waiting for another 'next' before it ACTUALLY started the format. Next step is to tidy up and see if arcconf V4 will actually work now that the controller is actually 'ready'. ASR-5405Z Configuration Notes will document all the relevant bits from the process if only to remind me when I get around to a fourth disk in the machine, which I've just realised I can now use the last slot in the 4 slot cage as previously I only had 3 spare SATA cables. Something good comes out of the mess.

Another area that has been fun recentrly is the problems playing videos that have been recorded over 20+ years and now don't play properly ... avidemux Updates and Notes contains the short version, but I need to pull some of the test stuff into that crib sheet.

Back in the 1980's I was happily working with Borland BCB as my development framework, and all of the systems worked off that. We had developed a simple graphics card that allowed multiple monitors to be hooked up and used as for information displays. Four 625 line RGB feeds of each card, and a number of ISA cards could be driven of the one machine. Novel at the time since multiscreen did not appeared in windows until a little later. The quality of Microsoft's software was poor and some of the language used in the driver software should never have been allowed to be published, but we got by and displayed systems running 16 and 25 monitor stacks at many locations at the time. Of cause today multiscreen displays are standard as my current 11520 by 2160 desktop attests. While demonstrating a 4 screen setup to the Benefit Agency, a chance conversation opened up one major path, and the Caller Management System was created. This started life running on a single 286 based computer talking to an array of simple alphanumeric terminals. The Benefit Agency had not at that time even started to use computers, with everything being done on index cards and paper. Waiting times were logged in hours and the early systems at least kept track of just how long people were waiting. A fuller history can be found on the LSCES website, so lets keep to the software side of things. One thing that the BA system was initially not allowed to do was to identify callers, they were just a ticket number, but fairly quickly that bar was lifted as staff realised that information on previous visits could save a LOT of time, so the data management side came important. Being Borland based, Interbase was the obvious choice to handle this although the decision to end of life it in 1999 caused a lot of problems which initially resulted in the code being open sourced and Firebird came into existence. Many critical services had been using Interbase and when the accountants realised they had made a mistake they tried to close the door again ... and failed. Borland changed hands eventually being taken over by Embarcadero in 2007. I did keep up the annual fees to keep the development framework working, but by then the alternate path had already appeared.

At the end of the 90's, computers were starting to appear on the counters and interview rooms of the BA, so a request was made to replace the keypads with something on the computer, and making that browser based seemed an obvious move, so adding PHP into the mix happened. I was involved with the development of the early releases of PHP5 and actually went live using the beta release rather than PHP4. Since Firebird was not yet active, we still had to rely on Interbase, but that was supported by it's own PHP driver. This was also supported by a PHP library ADOdb which has been my base since day one. The original CMS web based code worked happily into the 2020's and the last systems were only taken out of service with the closure of face to face offices as a result of Covid.

There had been a development of a much more powerful version of CMS which offered a lot more flexibility, but in the end it never got rolled out live, however it was used on several websites such as my son's Cotswold Security support system. The original base was tikitwiki, but as with the BCB based systems, the core developers had rather blinkered views and adding functions was somewhat frowned on, so I became involved with a fork called tikipro which was based on a modular approach to functionality. It was renamed bitweaver following complaints from the tikiwiki project and I see that project has now adopted simply tiki. The latest build of bitweaver is what is running this site with Nginx, PHP8.4 and Firebird5 backing it up, and the forked code is fairly well documented on github. In addition to the ADOdb based stuff I have been forced to with Laravel's illuminate and the current driver for that is also on github. This was because while I struggled to keep phpgedview working with PHP8, the more active fork of that, webtrees, had dropped ADOdb and move to illuminate. I have the family tree back up and running finally, with everything stored in Firebird which is comfortable at least.

James had a falling out with his original employer before setting up Cotswold Security, and to tide him over he took over Rainbow Digital Media. The history of this is documented on that site and many of the customers were converted to bitweaver as soon as it because apparent that their sites were not as well protected as he had been lead to believe. I ended up stepping in to wipe a lot of inappropriate or fraudulent content that was sitting on sites that used an assortment of frameworks that had not been maintained at all. Initially the hackers were still accessing the sites which was also fun, but once the various back doors were eliminated, often simply by disabling on line editing of content, we got things back under control. The move to using bitweaver provided a secure way to restore clients edit facilities and in many cases, the existing style sheets could be mirrored as a bitweaver theme very quickly. Although a few clients did pay for redesigns as part of the process. Following James's death and with a number of live sites having been moved to their owners own hosting, only a few sites remain on the RDM banner.

That brings us almost up to date and where I am today. One thing that I have been trying to add to bitweaver for many years has been the ability to use pdf files like any other content. Search engines do index the text layers if available, and having spent much time scanning 50 odd years of Model Engineer magazines, being able to view an index of them on line, search for particular content and then display a selected result actually opening it on the right page with it's find function available has been a dream. Dolphin on my Linux desktop can search the content ... along with libreoffice content as well ... but then one has to manually find the relevent page. So what I have achieved in the last couple of weeks is a search that includes pdf text and and in browser viewer that then highlights the search result. All I have left to finish now is protecting access to material that will require a login. It is working fine on the development machine, but getting the production servers to mimic it has been a little problematic. But I will crack it! In the meantime the public domain material just needs processing to read the existing pdfs and update the text field in the database ...

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder original development framework
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase reason I am now on Firebird 
https://firebirdsql.org/ link to history perhaps
https://lsces.uk/wiki/a+potted+history ? add https://rainbowdigitalmedia.uk/wiki/History+of+Rainbow+Digital+Media
https://www.bitweaver.org/ although some of the functions such as search no longer work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiki_Wiki_CMS_Groupware Which needs an update since the project is now simply Tiki
https://github.com/lsces?tab=repositories all my code is freely available on line
https://myhomecloud.uk/webtrees/index.php?route=%2Fwebtrees%2Ftree%2FCaineHumphries even my mods to get webtrees working with Firebird
https://medw.uk/search/index.php?highlight=Shumatech&content_type_guid=&search=go at last can search pdfs on-line!
https://medw.uk/fisheye/image/1189?highlight=Shumatech and display them with the search active

The priority stack that Claude has just summarised:

1. Get the installer working ✓
2. PHP 8.4 compatibility on Tags/Pigeonholes ✓
3. Modern style within Bootstrap 3 ✓
4. Bootstrap 5 migration → "later, if ever" ✓

That's pragmatic. You're modernizing the infrastructure (PHP, Firebird, Nginx) while keeping the interface layer stable. That's exactly how you should approach legacy system upgrades.

The MERG archive will work beautifully on this stack, and your users won't care whether it's BS3 or BS5—they'll just care that it's fast, searchable, and lets them find what they need.

The key here is I have been looking at the archive of material available from MERG behind their firewall, and seeing how I can make it more accessible. The starting point is for all of the pdf material to be searchable on the website, and a key element I have finally sorted out is displaying pdf files IN the page, with a working highlight direct from the search link. This makes navigation between pdf's a lot easier than when they simply open in the browser as a new page. Getting the find bar to open was something Claude distracted me from for two days, when the answer was actually very easy. It is just a pity that the CURRENT hack is not properly linked to on the pdf.js github threads.

Getting everything clean on PHP8.4 has been a pain, but all the live sites are now using the latest build of the code, and both pdf's and videos are actually displaying as the used to some time ago. Now to attack the installer and see if I can create a new site from scratch to play with the MERG material directly.

The client launcher makes sense for:

• Single-machine users who want a local GUI alternative to YaST
• Desktop/workstation users who prefer a native app over opening a browser

The web UI is perfect for:

• Headless/text-only servers (your case)
• Remote monitoring via ssh tunnel or direct access
• Users who are already comfortable with command-line and just want a dashboard
• Minimal resource overhead on the server itself

All that I actually needed to load was cockpit itself on the servers, and I now have a tab open in Firefox which allows me to toggle between the two servers and see information that is difficult to gather from the command line. It has thrown up a problem which I had probably spotted but which was a lot easier to debug given the concise log information cockpit returns, and although it does allow me to run updates, Claude agrees that that operation is tidier still using the command line. Perhaps sometime in the future?

The other job this week was dealing with 5 boxes of stamp material. Having been collecting the philatelic output of the Isle of Man since 1973, I finally stopped paying what was by then some £40 a quarter back in 2016 ... as we found when reviewing things. Phill at Phill-lately and Stamps had cringed when I said at least 3 of the boxes where Manx material and I already knew that there is simply no market for them with large lots going unsold in the auction houses even at a £20-30 valuation. So I was not going to recoop perhaps £3k's worth of investment. In the end I walked away with £80 and a couple of empty boxes and there is more space under the bed to bring stuff down from the loft! I'm still waiting on something from the housing ombudsman as just what I can and can't do in the loft and it's now nearly two weeks since the compliance officer made a second visit and promised something in writing ...

The next problem that is slowly creeping up is the retiring of YAST. I get all the arguments but neither of the servers HAS a desktop, so using the better 'graphic tools' is not an option and currently I can manage everything via a command prompt window with SSH to each machine. Yes we can drop back to command line tools, but YAST ones just work so well ...

I started to use PHP at the end of the 1990's when my main client, the Benefits Agency, started to use PC's in the offices. Up until then, my single PC with multiple remote terminals was often the only computer in the office, with everything else being handled manually by looking up cards in the card index. Our Caller Management System used anonymous ticket numbers to keep track of clients in the office, and waiting times were measured often in hours! The move to having an actual computer system allowed the replacement of the remote terminals with a browser page, and PHP was a lot more flexible than the compiled BCB code that preceded it. That was when I started using the ADOdb abstraction layer to access what by then was Firebird, which had replaced Interbase after Borland decided that that should be end of lifed. Once they realised just how critical Interbase was to major systems around the world, they tried to close the door, but the open source version is well supported today. The data that I stored back in the 1990's is still accessible today! It's a pity that the continual drive to 'improve' PHP and destroy some of it's inherent simplicity is a problem today. My current setup is still suffering from areas of the code that worked fine 20+ years ago, but are no longer 'politically correct'. Having to flag every variable that is operationally perfectly acceptable to not have been set is an ongoing minefield, and no I will not hide those 'warnings' as from day one my codebase had always been clean, so any hickup was important to know about.

The path to achieve what I was planning back in the last century has still not been achieved, and there is nothing 'off the shelf' that answers all the functionality that we were looking for back in 'TikiWiki' days. A modular framework to which modules could be added as required lead to the split that became Tikipro, which was later renamed Bitweaver. This formed the base of my commercial software for many years, although the Caller Management System never ACTUALLY used it live as those clients were happy with the older system. Various pressures lead to the end of it's use across over 250 offices at one stage, starting with the sale of those offices to private caretakers at which time while the IT system remained with the Benefit agency, the Caller system was 'part of the office' and the new owners simply stopped paying for support. That said, many offices did pay for it out of their own budget, and the next hickup was the death of XP when Microsoft used it's illegal monopoly to force many government departments to 'save money' by agreeing to take on the new licencing structure and their 'client management system' which never did provide the call system that was promised as part of hte package. Again some clients carried on funding the CMS, but we were down to 10 or so sites, and the last of those, Wyre Forest', only retired the system after Covid, when they they closed the drop in centre completely. Although the phone system had been using it, that had at least evolved the tracking tools that replaced the CMS data.

So where are we today? I have retired and am now only keeping a few of the legacy websites alive, but it's a continual battle against PHP and the vast majority of packages that were available for bitweaver have not been brough up to 'modern standards'. I am fighting to keep those that I do use active, but have had to give in and Nextcloud is running to provide a stable interface to my mobile devices and I've got Webtrees working with Firebird so I can access data from other bitweaver packages, but the legacy email archive is still only accessible via thunderbird on the desktop machine and even Nextcloud has no facility to access it. I need to review just what work is needed next to try and plug the holes which have been open since day one of moving to web based services!

There have been a couple of model railway shows in between. The Midlands Garden Rail Show the previous weekend at the Warwickshire Event Centre, where I had my run-in with the floor last year. No problems this year and a couple of hours scouting around. I should have thought to take the boiler with me to sort out a smaller burner, but there was only one live steam parts stand. A job to remember for the Model Engineering Show. Or the Stoneleigh show at the end of April.

This weekend I ended up on the MERG stand at the Redditch Model Railway Show. I was supposed to just cover the one day, but ended up doing both. Been a while since I was the other side of the table, it it was quite an enjoyable time, if a little cold at times. MERG had a couple of demonstration panels which unlike the other exhibits, people were encouraged to play with. The kids were fascinated and it allowed them to burn off a little energy after all the 'you must not touch' in the rest of the show. I've signed up as a kitting Elf and have a set of 5 kits to look after. There was a requestion for a batch of one of them last Friday, and I ended up building them up on the stand on the Saturday as it was quiet later on. Little cockup in that I'm 7 transistors short but those are on their way from Rapid along with a couple of bits to finish a DM Super rotary table controller. I sold the stock one a while back, and I will have fun machining the box for this one as I don't have either of the mills fully functional, but if I can get all the wiring sorted then it may need a little hand machining to complete.

I've also spent a little time getting up to speed on the range of boards that MERG produce, and have an outline plan for the next stage of the model railway options. The N gauge kit is probably going to be an easier starting point and will be better served by the electronics, while the best I can hope for the 45mm gauge kit is big oval with a couple of siding loops. Modifying the current engine for battery power with a radio control will be easy given all the bits needed are already in the loft, while the N gauge stuff will need some DCC chipped engines to get me started, along with the MERG controller and track driver. So need some spare cash to handle that, although the DC powered N gauge trains could do with actually being tested.

I have an appointment on Thursday to value the stamp collection. Despite the fact that there are a few thousand pounds worth of Isle of Man material in a couple of the boxes, I'm seeing these daily on the auction sites with estimates in the tens of pounds. Phill the valuer cringed when I said what I had, but I told him I already knew not to expect him to be interested, and hope that some of the other material such as my mothers material from the 1950's may be more productive. He has said just bring everything, so I will, along with some black sacks to sort the rubbish. At the end of the day there is little point hanging on to any off it and the same goes for the map collection which is filling another few boxes. Just a matter of sorting everything into sensible lots but rather than putting it on ebay, I think one of the local auctions may be better.