Happy New Year!

In 2012 we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the very first Cardbox, which was launched (for 8-bit computers running CP/M) in February 1982. It is a testament to the loyalty of our users and the solidity of the product that there are people using Cardbox for Windows today who first came across Cardbox in the 1980s.

We will be celebrating in two ways.

First, with immediate effect, the Home Edition of Cardbox 3.0 is now a free download, with its manual available in PDF format as well as a printed book. Our ambition has always be that everybody should know and use Cardbox, and we don’t want its price to stand in the way. If you aren’t familiar with what the Home Edition offers, please visit http://www.cardbox.com/downloading/home.htm now, and have a look. Each one of you knows someone who needs Cardbox. Tell them today.

Second, we will be working this year on making Cardbox available through the Cloud, so that it is accessible from any Internet-connected computer. Our client-server architecture makes this easy to do in principle, and the Cardbox Server is our most bug-free product since the original 1982 Cardbox, so we have a good foundation for what we plan to do. By the end of the year, our aim is that every Cardbox user should be able to have databases in the Cloud, accessible, secure, and automatically backed up, and to share them with anyone they want, live, and with updates immediately visible: friends, family members, or business colleagues. Much of this can already be done today, by renting a server in the Cloud and putting the Cardbox Server on it: our challenge is to remove all the layers of bureaucracy and administration from this procedure so that it becomes simple, transparent, cheap, and in many cases free.

None of this makes the Cardbox Server obsolete. In any corporate context where the resources are available, systems administrators will value the security and efficiency of having everything under their direct control. Our job now is to made the same benefits available to everybody else – technical or non-technical, corporate or non-corporate.

We’ll be making further announcements as the year progresses. If you want to keep track of things in more detail, you may wish to subscribe to our blog. If you want to discuss anything in this announcement, please email us at support@cardbox.com.

Best wishes for 2012!

Martin Kochanski and the Cardbox team.

To subscribe to Cardbox News emails, visit this page.

The setup we’ve described has only two ports open onto the Internet: port 22 (the SSH port) and port 3105 (for Cardbox). In principle anyone could attempt to log in to port 22, using a known or guessed username and guessing the password.

One extreme measure you could take would be to shut down the SSH daemon altogether:

service stop sshd
chkconfig sshd off

You would still be able to access your server through the ‘Console’ tab in Rackspace’s ‘cloud control’ panel, and you could turn the SSH daemon on temporarily with service start sshd if you needed to use it for maintenance – for instance, uploading or downloading files using scp or SFTP.

For more nuanced security, the key document is Securing OpenSSH on the CentOS web site. At the very least, you should prevent remote logins to ‘root’, relying instead on logging in as some other user and then using su to change to ‘root’. You could also set up public keys and prevent password-based logins altogether.

Installing an NTP client

yum install ntp

Telling it where to look for the time

ntpdate 0.pool.ntp.org

Starting the service

service ntpd start

Telling the service to start automatically

chkconfig ntpd on

As an experiment, we took an existing Linux-based Cardbox Server and tried moving it onto a Rackspace Cloud Server.

1. Server setup

It is necessary to sign up with Rackspace. The exact procedure depends on whether you are already a customer of theirs, and it may change from time to time, so I shan’t reproduce it here.

Once we had signed up, we opened the Rackspace Cloud control panel, went to the Cloud Servers page, and pressed the “Add Server” button.

A list of operating systems appeared. We chose CentOS 6.0, which is a close relation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

On the next page, we specified a server with 10GB of disk and 256MB of RAM, and gave it the name “tiny-server”.

A message then popped up giving us the Root/Administrator password for this server, which was tiny-serverHMrtG7w6. (We have changed the password since then).

The Server Details window then appeared, showing that Rackspace were building the server. It took 4 minutes to build the server, after which its status was shown as “Active”. From this moment, it was costing us 1p an hour.

The IP address of the new server, 31.222.171.43, was shown in the Server Details page. We added this to our DNS records under the name ‘tiny.cardbox.net’.

We then connected to the server via SSH:

ssh root@tiny.cardbox.net

and used the ‘passwd’ command to change the password.

2. System setup

Additional software

The ‘cardbox-shared’ program requires some additional components – ‘shared libraries’ – which are not included in Rackspace’s setup.

We ran the following command:

yum install glibc.i686

Allowing connections

By default, the cloud server does not accept connections on TCP port 3105, which the Cardbox clients use to connect to the Cardbox Server. To allow connections on this port, we ran the following two commands:

iptables -I INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 3105 -j ACCEPT
service iptables save

Setting up a user

The Cardbox Server should not run as ‘root’, so we set up a new user called ‘server’:

useradd server
passwd server


We then switched to this user:

su server

We also created a couple of directories, because we knew we would need them later, to store the Cardbox database files:

mkdir databases
mkdir databases/samples

3. Copying files from the existing server

Copying Cardbox

We logged in to our existing Linux server, moved to its ‘server’ directory and copied the Cardbox Server program across, together with its licence and configuration files:

scp -p cardbox-shared licence.ini server.ini server@tiny.cardbox.net:.

Copying the database files

In our particular case, the database files we wanted to copy were in a directory called ‘databases/samples’. This is why we created a ‘databases/samples’ directory earlier.

Still on our existing server, we copied the database files across:

scp -p databases/samples/* server@tiny.cardbox.net:databases/samples

We then disconnected from our existing server.

4. Editing the configuration files

We now returned to the new server, where we were logged in as the user ‘server’.

The ‘licence.ini’ file contains the licence for the Cardbox Server. Because this was only a temporary experiment, we left the file unchanged. Note, however, that your Cardbox Server licence only entitles you to run one copy of the Cardbox Server, so if you are planning to run two separate servers, you need two separate licences.

The ‘server.ini’ file contains all the other Cardbox Server settings. We edited ours to remove the section on automatic backup (we didn’t want to back up files to the same Amazon S3 bucket from two different places) and to remove references to the database files we hadn’t copied across.

5. Testing

We entered the command:

./cardbox-shared

and the Cardbox Server started. It displayed some startup messages, including the crucial one:

Server is now listening (socket 4) for generic connections on address 0.0.0.0:3105

The Cardbox Server was now running.

Going to Cardbox on a Windows PC, we did File > Open > Server, typed ‘tiny.cardbox.net’ into the Server box, pressed the View button, and were shown the list of available databases:

We tried opening a database and doing a few searches. Everything looked OK, so we closed the databases we had opened, and closed Cardbox itself.

Back in our  ‘server’ session, we pressed Ctrl+C to halt the server. The test was over.

6. Completion

It was now time to make the server permanently available. We entered the command

./cardbox-shared -d

and the Cardbox Server started. No messages appeared, because they were now all being written to the ‘cardbox.log’ file. We verified that the startup messages were OK with the command

tail cardbox.log

7. The end

There was nothing more to be done, so we closed our ‘ssh’ connection to the new server. Anyone on the Internet could now connect to the new Cardbox Server at ‘tiny.cardbox.net’ and view and search the databases on it.

Resource usage

Although this is the smallest server size that Rackspace support, there are still 8GB of disk space available.

Security

The only ports open to the outside world are port 22 for SSH connections and port 3105 for Cardbox itself. There is no web server and no email on this machine.

Backup

Rackspace can back up the cloud server’s entire hard disk to their own Cloud Files service. This can be done by pressing a button in their Cloud Servers control panel, or you can select an option for regular automatic backup.

The backup of the initial setup, as described here, took up 466GB of Cloud Files space. Keeping it in Cloud Files will cost just over 5p a month.

In addition, it is possible to configure the Cardbox Server to back up its own database files regularly and automatically to your Amazon S3 account.

We do both.

Manual intervention

In the configuration we’ve described, the Cardbox Server does not start automatically when the server itself starts. So if the server has to be rebooted for any reason, we would need to start the Cardbox Server by hand, as described in step 6. A future blog post will describe how to make the Cardbox Server start automatically.

A single backslash with nothing after it – just “\” – means nothing at all. Previous builds of Cardbox tried to interpret a single backslash as something and would crash as a result. This bug has now been corrected. Cardbox no longer crashes.

Remember: if you want to search for “\”, type “\\”.

There are two specialised features of pick lists. One is that a value with an underline in it (eg. “pick_list”) is displayed in the list without the underline (“pick list”) but is entered into the field with the underline (“pick_list”). A bug introduced in Build 4297 caused the underline to be omitted in certain circumstances. This bug has now been corrected.

The second specialised feature of pick lists is that they can contain both a code and a longer explanation of that code, much like drop-down lists. For instance, “SE=Systems_Engineer”. In this case, “Systems Engineer” is displayed when you call up the pick list with a right-click, but “SE” is what is actually entered into the field if you select this particular entry. Pick lists can appear in two forms, either as a menu that pops up when you right-click in a field or as a scrolling list that appears when you select “Pick…” from that menu. The menu typically has only a few entries, while the scrolling list has them all. An old bug – as old as Cardbox itself – meant that a menu item containing “=” did nothing when you clicked on it. This bug has never been reported to us. The reason that nobody has ever reported this bug is presumably that the sophisticated users who use “=” also tend to have long lists of options and therefore never use the menu, only the scrolling list. In any case, this bug has also been corrected.

1. They add an image field to an existing database.
2. They try to add an image to the database.
3. Cardbox reports that the image field is read-only.

Understandably, this is rather puzzling. It only happens with databases that were created with older versions of Cardbox. The quick cure is to rebuild the database with Tools > Management > Rebuild > Database. This Knowledge Base page gives a detailed explanation.