Who we are

We are the developers of Plastic SCM, a full version control stack (not a Git variant). We work on the strongest branching and merging you can find, and a core that doesn't cringe with huge binaries and repos. We also develop the GUIs, mergetools and everything needed to give you the full version control stack.

If you want to give it a try, download it from here.

We also code SemanticMerge, and the gmaster Git client.

webadmin – introducing the new server admin tool

Friday, October 20, 2017 Pablo Santos 2 Comments

We have just released a new cross-platform (web-based) admin tool to configure and monitor the Plastic SCM server. We call it webadmin and it is included in release 6.0.16.1699.

How to use it?

New install? Easy, just open a browser to localhost:7178 in your server after installing Plastic SCM and you are done.

Existing install – the webadmin will also listen on locahost:7178 on your server machine. But it won’t let you login before you set a password for it. Just open a browser to localhost:7178 and follow the steps.

We are not currently using HTTPS to avoid the warning message about self-signed certificates that will throw lots of users back when using it for the first time, but this is something we obviously need to add soon.

What it is all about?

It is a new administration console for the server. Historically we had admintool.exe, configureserver.exe and umtoolgui.exe to configure and administer the server, including creating users and groups. The 3 tools were Windows only.

We needed to come up with a cross-platform solution for the Linux and OS X servers, and a web interface made a lot of sense. And that’s what webadmin is about. A tool to let you tune the server params, monitor it, create users and groups, and even migrate to different backends.

And everything made self-explanatory with texts detailing what every setting is about.

What can webadmin do exactly?

The new admin console allows you to:

  • Configure the network, including ports (TCP, SSL), the auto-discovery service and more (REMARK: UDT is not working at this point, but it will be ready soon).
  • Configure authentication: to select the authentication mode (user-password, LDAP, Active Directory, etc), finely tune each mode (different params in LDAP, for instance) and even configure users and groups in UP.
  • Repository storage: to tune settings and migrate to a different backend.
  • Advanced parameters like forcing specific client versions, timeouts, threadpool settings and more.
  • Configure the audit log.
  • Configure lock rules: that now are also auto-reloaded without having to restart the server.
  • Comprehensive license configuration: both during evaluation and server operation.
  • A new support functionality to easily create "support bundles" to send relevant info in seconds when an issue happens.
  • An option to recover access to the system if the sysadmin was incorrectly revoked.
  • Monitor: a server monitoring panel to track health and performance parameters.

Bonus track – config files are now reloaded on the fly

As part of this project we made some key changes to the Plastic SCM server. Now it monitors all the relevant configuration files and reloads them when it detects changes. So there is no need to restart the Plastic SCM server when you manually edit server.conf, db.conf, remoting.conf and lock.conf.

Pablo Santos
I'm the CTO and Founder at Códice.
I've been leading Plastic SCM since 2005. My passion is helping teams work better through version control.
I had the opportunity to see teams from many different industries at work while I helped them improving their version control practices.
I really enjoy teaching (I've been a University professor for 6+ years) and sharing my experience in talks and articles.
And I love simple code. You can reach me at @psluaces.

Pablo Santos

2 comments:

  1. kevinNovember 30, 2017 at 9:42 AM

    I admin 2 PlasticScm Servers (1 personal and 1 at my work) and i can't change the repository storage from the webAdmin.

    In both the current backend is JET, but i want one to be MYSQL, it's not posible migrate from jet to another?.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pablo SantosNovember 30, 2017 at 2:13 PM

      Hi Kevin,

      JET is our fastest and more solid backend. It took us years to decide to go forward with it, but now it is in use in some of our largest deployments, with hundreds of concurrent users and TBs of repo sizes.

      So, our belief was: JET is the best, so no reason to migrate out of it :-)

      JET uses memory mapped files to access the underlying metadata files, and pointer arithmetic, so it runs circles around MySQL and SQL Server with Plastic.

      Now, if you still want to migrate, and until we release a proper database-to-database migration for Jet, you can always replicate between servers :)

      Delete

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