My Weekend Project: trellminder (Trello email notifications)

Love trello!  My wife and I use it to coordinate what needs to be done around the house.  And I agree with the folks at trello that email notifications (and email in general) are lousy.  I don't want to see each time a card changes - the only thing I want to be alerted when a task is about to be due or is past due.  Mainly so I don't get in trouble at home ;-)  So I thought it would be a fun weekend project.

I use CentOS at work so I'm most comfortable with Red Hat and I've played with OpenShift, their PaaS option, before.  This feels like a cron job, which OpenShift supports.  Trello has a nice API so this wasn't too hard to code in Python.  I didn't want to make my Trello board public of course but you can generate a token which allows read-only access to a board, once approved.

Once you get an account on OpenShift, create a python-2.6 app and add the cron cartridge:

rhc app create trellminder python-2.6
rhc cartridge add cron-1.4 -a trellminder

I use requests whenever possible - urllib2 should be avoided at all costs.  To do so, add "install_requires=['requests']" to setup.py in your root dir.

There was a very helpful question on the OpenShift forum which clued me into how this script should run.  Mainly, I should use a shell script to activate the Python 2.6 virtenv then call the python script.  The use of a 'jobs.deny' file would force cron to call the .sh and ignore the .py.

The actual source code is posted on my github repo.

Getting replicated Ehcache and iptables to play nice

Struggled with this a bit and thought others might find this useful.  If you're using RMI Replicated caching with Ehcache, you need to put a little thought into port security/strategy.  The sample ehcache.xml includes:


Using this config means you're going to have to poke holes in iptables for ports 40001 and 40002.  All that is pretty simple - the gotcha is if you're using automatic peer discovery.  It needs multicasting to work.  The docs call this out but it took me awhile to realize I had to specifically allow it in iptables, as it is likely prohibited by default in most environments.

IBM has a nice post about how to do this.  So in this example (replicated Ehcache with automatic peer discovery), you'll need this in iptables on each host you expect to participate:

-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 40001 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 40002 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -m pkttype --pkt-type multicast -j ACCEPT