Wow, my boy, you’re 7 years old today!

That’s 2,556 days old.  You’ve been in this world for 61,344 hours – that’s many many hours my boy.  I can only imagine the things you’ve learned.

Remember the last time I saw you? It was at the airport in Kota Kinabalu. Your tongue was full of garlic.

It has been 568 days since then. 568 longs days, not one of which has passed without me thinking about you.

I’m always thinking of you Jarrod.

Happy, happy 7th Birthday.

Love, your dad.

Fresh off several failed attempts to make OpenERP work on Ubuntu Sever 9.10, I’m hungry to make something work and so I’m diving straight into installing OpenBravo on Ubuntu Server 9.10.

12.28pm For the sake of starting afresh I’m reinstalling Ubuntu Server 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and then I’ll follow this Installing OpenBravo ERP on Ubunu tutorial.

1:10pm A quick edit of /etc/apt/sources.list to un-comment (remove the # at the start fthe partner repositories from where OpenBravo EPR will be downloaded:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu karmic partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu karmic partner

Then just type the next few commands to update the repositories and install OpenBravo ERP.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install openbravo-erp

It needs to download a staggering 216MB of archives and will then use a whopping 1.3GB of additional disk space.  O dear, here comes a 2 -3 hour download.  Time for lunch.

2.35pm It seems the bulk of the download is done and it’s busy pulling the OpenBravo files down very quickly indeed. Malaysian mirror perhaps?

3.00pm Download seems complete and loads of info notices are flying across the Terminal window as it’s installing and configuring all sorts of stuff.

3.14pm It seems to be done and the message in the terminal window tells me “Installation is now complete! To access your Openbravo instance, please point your browser to http://ip_address/openbravo“. That all seems suspiciously easy.

3.15pm Oh. My. God. It works!!  Now I’m totally unprepared.

I read a lot about OpenERP thinking I’d get that to work and now I have to go on another learning binge to get to know OpenBravo ERP.  I can’t believe that install was so easy.

Time to explore…

Yes, the title of this post is a good question.  At the moment I don’t have the answer, but I sure am trying to find it and hopefully, by the end of this post I will have it.

I’ve been trying to do it for the last week, but between my limited knowledge of Linux servers and the totally new world of OpenERP, it’s a learning curve so steep I slip 2 steps back for every 1 forward I manage.

The story so far is that I had the Ubuntu Server running flawlessly, I had the OpenERP server running flawlessly, I even made friends with PostgreSQL, but for the life of me I couldn’t get OpenERP web to talk to the servers enough to successfully create a database and then log in to it.

So at this very moment I’m reinstalling Ubuntu Server 9.10 with nothing more than a mail server, an SSH server and the Samba server.  The rest I’m going to do with what is hopefully the magic bullet – the OpenERP self install script.

Step 1: Install Ubuntu Server 9.10 (8.50am)

I’m doing a pretty much Vanilla install of Ubuntu Server 9.10 32-bit on an ex-Vista laptop.  I’ve said yes to a couple of things:

• automatic security updates,
• installing an SSH server (I will manage it from my desktop),
• the Samba file server and
• a mail server.

This is all because there is a script out there that will supposedly install OpenERP for me if I have it setup like this. Supposedly.

The install took about 30 minutes, with a fast Internet connection / computer it would likely be faster.

Step 2: SSH to the New Server (9.30am)

I’ve setup my server on a fixed IP address on the office router (for demo purposes 192.168.1.1) and let’s say  my username is ’1earth’.   I launch a Terminal instance and type the following and hit enter:

ssh 1earth@192.168.1.1

The system is working as expected and tells me there are some security updates and upgrades to do.  It’s a bit of schlep as this will take at least another 30 minutes on my slow Internet connect, but for the sake of good system administration I type

sudo apt-get upgrade

Oh nice, it will actually take 50 minutes, so I will gather the rest of the info I need for when it’s done.

Step 3: Follow Installation Instructions for Dummies

If you Google “openerp ubuntu server 9.10 installation” you’ll likely hit one of OpenSourceConsulting’s tutorials. There’s a few old ones, left on there for the SEO ranking no doubt, so make sure you follow the newest one and save yourself hours (if not days) in wasted time.

The tutorial I’m going to follow is OpenERP Installation: All In One For Ubuntu With Updates, with fingers double and triple crossed.

If you’re also trying to install OpenERP on Ubuntu Server 9.10, scroll down and find the “Ubuntu Server (for advanced users not interested in having a GUI desktop)” section. I’m not an advanced user, but it doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.

Day 1

11.01am – Starting the instructions.

11.38am - It’s been downloading and installing like mad.  According to the instructions I should exit SSH and log in again, however I was now asked for my password and when I entered it, it says “OpenERP will now be installed“. Deviation from the plan. I’m worried.

Nevertheless, I continue and it offers me a choice of Stable or Trunk. I don’t know any better, so I select Stable.

Next it asks me if I want to install the Apache Server (ticked), Extra Addons (not ticked) and Firewall (ticked).  I tick the Extra Addons and thus elect to install everything on offer.

Next it asks me which trunk branches to install and offers a list of unticked items: openerp-spain, magentoerpconnect, report-openoffice, openetl.  I have no clue what any of these are. I assume it’s the Extra Addons I ticked.  I won’t install any of them right now, so I just click OK without ticking anything.

Now it tells me “Enter the DNS name of your URL” and offers openerpweb.com as a default. Dammit, what does this mean? I don’t have a DNS name for my URL. Is it the URL of my server? I use diveserver.dev (which doesn’t exist) and click OK.

Next it offers a list of IP addresses already configured on my Ubuntu system.  The right one is listed. Yay! A feeling of relief. OK to that.

Now it asks for the admin password. Of what? My Ubuntu box or what I want for OpenERP?  I enter one for OpenERP and hit OK.

Ok, now it asks for my SUDO password. I enter it and hit OK.

11.52am Progress bar pops up going left and right and text says “Installing BZR“.  I like the way it’s going so far, it seems positive.

12:01pm “OpenERP Server: Downloading latest stable branch from launchpad.net”

12:15pm “OpenERP Client: Downloading latest stable branch from launchpad.net“.

12:20pm “OpenERP Client Web: Downloading latest stable branch from launchpad.net“.

12:26pm “OpenERP Addons: Downloading latest stable branch from launchpad.net“. Hmmm, I thought I said no to these.

1.00pm Time for lunch. Hopefully the Addons will be done by the time I get back.

1.56pm – Back from lunch and OpenERP Addons were still installing. I thought it hanged, but then saw that my iMac had downloaded and readied for installation nearly 1GB of updates! I got rid of the iMac prompt and at the same time, it could have been coincidence, the progress bar updated with “DON’T PRESS ACCEPT/OK !!. Downloading and installing Python libraries“.

3.03pm – In the Terminal Window, while the progress bar is still swinging back and forth, it said “Extracting templates from packages: 100%” and then asked for my password.  I typed it and hit return. It line-breaked, but nothing else. Progress bar still swings.

3.51pm – Finally clicked “Cancel” which promptly killed the process. 2 hours is simply more than it should take.  Now I’m going to run ./openerp-allinone-setup.sh again and see what happens.

It’s going through the entire process again, but it skips over everything that’s been done already… and zooms straight past the Python libraries and onto “DON’T PRESS ACCEPT/OK !!. Downloading and installing Postgres Database“. Right, maybe it did hang.

4.26pm – “DON’T PRESS ACCEPT/OK !!. Installing OpenERP Software” with non-disruptive warning message before it switched.

4.32pm – “DON’T PRESS ACCEPT/OK !!. Downloading and Installing Apache”

4:36pm – “DON’T PRESS ACCEPT/OK !!. Enabling Firewall settings”

5.03pm – Patience is running thin and it’s still enabling the Firewall settings. Surely it doesn’t take 30 minutes? I’m clicking cancel.

Cancel didn’t work, so I CTRL+C’ed the terminal window and it escaped. So, running the script again. It says OpenERP is already installed, do I want to upgrade it.  I said no. Fudge. Let’s see if it works.

It says there should be an OpenERP-README.txt file with further instructions.  I can’t find it with ‘sudo find / -name OpenERP-README.txt’ so I’m going to go through the upgrade process and see what happens. Sigh.

Right, upgrade went quick and it said all’s OK.

5.13pm I go to http://192.168.1.1:8080 and it loads. I feel nothing, this is as far as I got. The proof is in the pudding, or the database creation.

5.14pm Clicking on the Database button takes me to http://127.0.0.1:8080/database and that obviously doesn’t work. Is this a bad setting I made somewhere coming to bite me in the ass, or what’s the story?

6.00pm After 45 minutes more of searching and reading I’m nowhere nearer to the answer than I was before.  Everyone in the office are leaving and so am I.  I’m secretly hoping that after a restart it will work thinking that it’s a stuck cache or something somewhere.

Day 2

9:10am I dreamed about this install last night.  First thing I did was check out my hosts file, but all seems OK.  I downloaded HTTPFox for Firefox so that I can see what traffic my browser sends and receives and where it gets told to go to 127.0.0.1, by OpenERP or what.

Ha! When I click the databases button on OpenERP-Web’s login page, my browser asks for 192.168.1.1, but then is redirected by OpenERP to 127.0.0.1.  A quick Google now using “OpenERP redirects to 127.0.0.1” yields this OpenERP Forum thread, which related to OpenERP 5.0.2.  But let’s try their solution and see if it works for OpenERP 5.0.7 as well.

In my /etc/openerp-web.cfg file tools.proxy.on = True already, so I change tools.proxy.base = ’192.168.1.1′, save and restart both the server and web.

9.30am – Right, that seems to take it to the right server (diveserver.dev – which doesn’t exist, but which the install script automatically added to my server’s hosts file and therefore works).

However, now Firefox is adamant that the security certificate is a problem (annoying, but Firefox is just protecting me) and it won’t let me continue, nor add an exception for it here or manually in the settings box.

I’m going to have to create myself a proper certificate that I can import.  Is nothing easy?

12.10 – I give up.

Creating a certificate didn’t work for me, because Firefox still complains about it not being trusted. I also couldn’t access the site using Safari or Chrome, both giving similar but different reasons to Firefox.  I tried taking the server off SSL, but I obviously don’t know how to do that either.

I’ve wasted enough time doing research on how to get this to work. My OpenERP adventure ends here.

Next, lets try OpenBravo.

Happy New Beer!

Where I left off last (year) was with my weaker-than-a-pale-ale-should-be brew in crude-but-effective cool box, bubbling away.

My previous batch fermented in a rapid 3 days, which I found out was because of the high temperatures.  With the cool box and the temperature down to a constant 23°C – 24°C, I was hoping to achieve the much read about 7-day fermentation.  That didn’t happen though.

After 4.5 days the bubbling stopped and a hydrometer reading of around 1.010 confirmed that a decent amount of sugar had been consumed and that further fermentation was unlikely.

I didn’t rack it over for maturing immediately though.

Kegging It

At some point after I built the box, but before I started the brew, I flew to Singapore on an AirAsia cheapy and acquired a second hand, reconditioned Cornelius soda-keg.

This 19-litre metal wonder was the answer to my bottling worries where temperature control was a whole different kettle of fish.  The only niggly bit was the CO² tank, which I didn’t get in Singapore because a) it was prohibitively expensive to buy and b) would have been just as expensive to take back with me considering weight and packaging.

I figured, because there’s plenty of bars serving kegged beer here in KK, finding a CO² cylinder wouldn’t be much of a hassle.  But it turned out to be plenty of hassle.

Clock Ticking in the Fermenter

So while I hoped my brew was secretly doing some undetectable fermenting still, I urgently searched for not just a CO² tank, but also a regulator to bring keg and cylinder together.

Leads I followed from friends didn’t yield any results. By day 7 I had to rack over my brew fearing it might start to suffer from the dreaded yeast autolysis. I sanitised the tank and transferred the beer into the keg, being as careful as possible not to splash and oxidise the beer, which could spoil it.

Even though I closed the keg properly, I was fully aware of the fact that the keg doesn’t seal tight unless it’s slightly pressurised.  I hoped that the lid alone would sufficiently keep out air until I could add CO².

Because I had 24 litres of brew and only 19 litres can fit in the keg, I had some spare for bottling, which was great for testing over the coming days to see how the beer matured.  Which it did beautifully.

A couple of days passed and eventually, through a strange set of circumstances, I guy came and dropped off a filled CO² cylinder for me to ‘borrow’ and didn’t ask any money for it.  The next day I found a place that could supply me with a regulator as soon as they got it in stock, which would be the next week.

I opened the keg, and manually blasted the top of the brew with heavier than air CO², hoping it would be sufficient to safeguard the brew until I acquired the regulator.

Regulator Found

Eventually MOX (Malaysian Oxygen) got new regulators in stock.

Marty Nachel’s instructions from Homebrewing for Dummies guided me through the carbonation process and soon had my keg pressurised.  I tested the brew, and it was awesome.  No spoils, no off flavours, just beautiful beer.

My next challenge was issues with carbonation – it foamed too much and had too much CO² in it.  I reread the chapter on carbonation searching for things that I missed.

The Science of Carbonating Beer

My first error was the temperature of the beer.

For CO² to properly dissolve in to the beer, the liquid needs to be cooler than 15°C (60°F), which was about 10°C less than what it was in my cool box.

The only solution was to put the keg in my fridge.  I have a small fridge.  To fit the keg I had to remove all the shelves and the vegetable tray and then I still had to squeeze to close the door. And there wasn’t space for much else – tomato sauce, a few veggies and whatever I could fit in the door.

I propped up the rubber mallet I use for capping bottles onto a box under the fridge door, just to make sure the door didn’t pop open during the night.

My second problem, would I discover as I poured the beer at a ridiculously fast flow rate, was the my duel-gage regulator didn’t have high and low PSI gauges, but instead had a high PSI gauge and a low litre-per-minute gauge.

This is problematic for two reasons – first, depending on the temperature of your beer, you need a relatively low PSI for carbonation – somewhere between 2 to 4 PSI, and secondly when you dispense it the pressure has to be between 5 and 8 PSI.

Because litres-per-minute is volume and PSI is pressure, there is no easy way to convert between the two. And the high PSI gauge is marked from 0 to 3,500, so you can’t exactly fine tune it by only opening the cylinder a bit either.

Through a series of tests over a span of a week, during which I dispensed (and drank) nearly half my keg of beer, I discovered that bringing the flow-rate up to just above where it’s not flowing at all, it’s enough to carbonate the beer sufficiently and dispense the beer without foaming it.

Litres-per-minute,  as I discover in my quest to find a conversion, is used in welding and not for beverages.  Apparently you can swap in a inexpensive, proper gauge (which would be marked from 0 to 50 or 60 psi) on the regulator – assuming you can find it.

Party Keg

“Stop drinking it”, the Jounro would scold me during my ‘tests’. “Didn’t you say you want to share it?”

I did.  The beer was good; real good. But what’s the point of real good beer if you can’t share it?

Luckily the Journo’s birthday was coming up.  The perfect opportunity to have some friends over for a braai in celebration of the Journo ageing another year, and, of course, beer.

And so it was that my beer got shared in honour of the Journo’s birthday.  Cake, friends, a braai with good food, and fresh beer on tap, which aside from being a little week (probably something like 3.5% alcohol), got rave reviews.  Does it get any better than this?

Actually, yes it does… But that’s another adventure all together.

I can’t help but notice, with some shock and amazement I might add, that I brewed last in February!  To be fair, that brew did last me almost until May.

It didn’t turn out so great, so I wasn’t confident enough to share it and thus, I slowly sucked down most of 23 litres of not-so-great-but-ok-to-drink beer. Amazing what you can get used to.

Replies to me bemoaning my fate in the forums (and on this blog) pointed to the most likely cause of my imperfect beer to be the high temperatures I tried to brew at. My living room, a.k.a. the brewing room, is a toasty and constant 30°C, except when we’re hit by several warm days in a row, in which case it goes up  to 32°C.

At those temperatures, said my fellow homebrewers on the forums, too much fusel alcohol is produced, which gives it the off-not-quite-like-beer flavours. The other annoying side effect of brewing at such high temperatures is that unless your beer is ice cold, it has head that takes forever to settle.

Try pouring that at a picnic.

Temperature Killer

I researched several inexpensive methods of keeping the fermenter cool and in the end decided to build a cool box based on an actual product I saw for sale on a beer brewing site.

A local stationary shop had Styrofoam sheets that I added my building supplies.  After some serious measuring and careful cutting, a cube took shape tall enough to accommodate my fermenter (with airlock attached) and a soda keg I planned to acquire.

To chill the cube’s interior in the first test, I froze solid a 1.5 litre bottle of water and placed it inside.  One side of the cube is detached and at first, based on the product I saw,  it was the bottom. The rest of the cube was the lid.  However, I think because my rough build doesn’t seal properly (at all), the cold just wafts away through the cracks – the temperature didn’t drop significantly and by morning the bottle of ice was almost room temperature water again.

In the second experiment I used 2 x 1.5 litre bottles, resealed the edges of the cube and flipped it upside down so that cube formed a bowl and the lid was 1 sheet on top. This worked much better and the bottles were still icy the next morning with the temperature inside stable at around 23°C.

Let the Brewing Begin

With my temperature worries solved, it was time to get brewing and my next batch is Cooper’s India Pale Ale.  Last night I went through the motions, sanitised my equipment, readied my water and followed the instruction from Homebrewing for Dummies.

In there they advise not to use the brewing sugars, but they also advise using 2 cans of malt extract to get a fuller body.  Clever me, did neither.

I laboured through carefully watching an hour long boil, infusing bittering hops at the 30 minute mark, and even gently woke up the yeast in luke warm water while the wort cooled down.  The cold top-up water was vigorously added to oxygenate the wort, and then I pitched the yeast at about 24°C.

Of course, only then did I realise I forgot to take a gravity reading (supposed to be done before adding the yeast).  It was 1.020 (or 1.022 after temperature correction) and according to my hydrometer in the finished brew range.  Disaster!

In a flash panic I dissolved 2kg of brewing dextrose in another litre of water and added it to my brew.  Now I have 24 litres of wort, but the gravity went up to an acceptable, although still weak, 1.032 (1.034).  Now I just have to hope my yeasties are super diligent and consume as much sugar as possible.

I put the fermenter to rest and started the clock at about 10pm.

The Morning After

Walking down the stairs this morning, intending to change the ice bottles, I was pleasantly surprised by the rumbling of my cool box. I listened as my brew bubbled away at 5-second intervals.

As I cracked the lid the sweet aroma of the fermentation process promised me great tasting beer – I sure hope that promise will be fulfilled.  The temperature in the box was still around 23°C and my ice bottles had a good core of ice in them, which positively affirms the efficiency of the box.  I swapped the bottles of ice out nevertheless.

Clearly the yeast is healthy and everything so far seems OK.  Now for that pain staking wait.