Duane Newman

I finally installed GForge on a new CentOS 5 server. It went pretty smooth (there where a couple hiccups) and now I have a project management system in place for all my projects.At work I have been using a VMWare install of GForge (from the GForgeGroup site) and we have had a very good experience so far. Project management is pretty flexible and the integrated management of the SVN repository is nice. We have our install using LDAP to integrate the logins to our Active Directory server-which has worked very well.

I have wanted to install one for FrogPond for some time to host some public projects I want to work on. Recently I got the need (ie: new project) to get it up and running. So I bit the bullet and set out to do a fresh install.

I have an old machine-nothing special by today’s standards-that I decided would make a good GForge Server. It is just a P3 1GHz with 512MB Ram and an 80 GB drive. Like i said: nothing special by todays standards-but good enough to run a low volume server.

One of the recommended distributions was CentOS 5. I decided to use it partly because I hadn’t been in a RedHat based system for quite a while (I run mostly Ubuntu now) and wanted to stay familiar with it. And it is touted as being pretty reliable. I ended up installing twice because the first time I installed and ran the updates and couldn’t get apache to work after that-so I installed again and skipped the updates for now.

I downloaded the GForge installer and began to follow the readme file. The first command worked well with one minor exception: it didn’t find postfix where it expected it (so I created a symlink to it from the /usr/kerberos/sbin/ directory).

The second install script ran without and issue.

The third install script took a little to get going. It requires IonCube to run and while GForge installs this with it (in this step) it was not already installed on my system for php. So a quick search on how to install IonCube into php had that resolved and I ran the last script. No issues. Everything ran well.

Then I tried to access my new GForge install. No dice.

I got an error about IonCube not being able to run. I do a little looking and discover that SELinux (which I choose the recommended action and enabled during install) was blocking the loading of the ioncube .so file. I found some commands to set the context of the .so and then got a slightly different error (I believe because it was trying to load yet another .so). After a while of trying to correct the problem I decided to “fix” it and disabled SELinux. Boom-worked.

One of these days I’ll try to figure out how to get SELinux enabled and working correct-but for now I am not concerned about GForge mucking with the box and I just want it to run.

Now that I have the server up I’m going to try to get a few utilities that I’ve created up there and make them (and some of the code) publicly available. Look for some projects to be popping up soon.

GForge is a good option for small businesses that don’t need to have a lot of clients with project logins. GForge AS will allow you to have 15 project members (and unlimited registered users). Perfect for me to create several projects for just a few clients. If you have need for more they have very good pricing for up to 30 project members.