John M. Grohol, Psy.D. writes: “As predicted, the media is now making some very generalized and meaningless connections between Cho’s hospitalization 16 months ago in 2005, and his actions on Monday.” The media in their undying need to sensationalize just keeps spoon feeding the public’s need to blame and retrospectively criticize everything surrounding last Monday’s shooting.

The implication, of course, is that since Seung-Hui Cho had undergone a psychological evaluation in 2005 and subsequently ordered to seek outpatient treatment, campus psychologists should have somehow been able to magically predict his shooting rampage. I actually heard a VA Tech student on NPR news say “They knew he had a mental illness so it seems like this could have been prevented somehow if someone had just done something.” Amazing! Never have I heard a comment of less value!

The bottom line is that things were done correctly. When problems were seen, Cho was sent for a psychological evaluation an ordered to get followup treatment. To those who say he should have been removed from school or locked up, I ask one very simple question. What if he had not gone on a shooting rampage? How would your actions of denying him an education or his freedom be seen if he never actually did the horrible things he did?

The point here is that a lot of people suffer from mental illness. For every person who looses it and starts shooting, there are hundreds of thousands more who are just trying to get through life the best they can with their illness. They never hurt anyone. We have to ask ourselves if we want to be a society that demonizes and alienates people with mental illness or one that is sympathetic, inclusive and helpful to them.

I have to say that it seems like Americans are calling for some pretty Orwellian policy when they start demanding that people with mental illness be removed from society. I would go on to suggest that doing so would make them more dangerous. Let’s look at what we know about Seung-Hui Cho. He was an outcast who didn’t have friends and was picked on by other students. In effect, he had been alienated from his community and demonized because of his illness. This, of course, all within the informal social context of a University setting. What Americans are calling for is a much more dramatic and official form of this ostracism. I can’t help but think this would only serve to further alienate people, causing them to decline and crack all the more easily.

Rather than pointing fingers and making mal-informed, unreasonable, knee jerk demands, America needs to try to truly understand what pushes people over the edge if they want to prevent these shootings from happening in the future. Since every school shooter we have seen was a bullied outcast, I think its safe to say we have a model to work with. Rather than vilifying the mentally ill, we need to focus on what causes them to get sick to begin with. A strong, zero tolerance approach to bullying seems like a very good start!

Everyone seems so quick to second guess the camps administration and police, suggesting that the community should have been told or the campus should have been closed down. What I don’t think these presumptuous pundants realize is that a shooter will always be able to find large groups of people on a college campus no matter how “locked down” it is. Had the administration canceled classes and somehow informed every student at VA Tech about the shooting, they would have all rushed to the nearest computer cluster and started emailing their friends. If they didn’t do that, they would have gathered in large groups to play hackie sack or some other group activity. The point is that people on college campuses tend to gather. When they don’t have classes, they tend to gather more. In all likelihood the shooter would have been able to find even larger groups of people to target had the campus been locked down.

I’m usually not one to stick up for the police, but in this case they did the right thing. When a person kills someone, they tend to run as fast and as far from the crime-scene as possible. The assertion that the shooter had probably left campus after the fist two shootings was reasonable and prudent. Ignoring the fact that it is logistically impossible to instantly notify 30,000 students of anything, closing down the campus would have most likely led to larger individual groups of students that could be more easily targeted. Americans really need to lose the habit of finger-wagging and blaming after something bad happens. The administration and police probably feel badly enough without having the whole country pontificating about what they should have done.

Its strongest points, in my opinion are that it does not depend in any way on Active Directory, and that it integrates well with open source standards like Open LDAP and University of Washington IMAP. Its downsides are that the documentation is sparse and scattered, that is is backed with PostgreSQL rather than MySQL, and that the package is bundled into a TON of RPM's.

I have not tried installing it from source, though I suspect that it would not be much more work than using the RPM's. Anyhow, if you want to install it for yourself, here are some quick scripts to help you, as well as some quick cookbook instructions. I installed it on RHEL 3 Workstation, though I suspect that it would work most Linux distributions.

The first thing we have to do is install the foundation for OpenGroupWare From the RHEL CD's or Website:

Install apache
Install PostgreSQL
Install PostgreSQL-devel
Install php
Install php_PostgreSQL

Next, run the following commands to get the database and webserver started:

# /sbin/chkconfig httpd on
# /sbin/chkconfig postgresql on
# /sbin/service postgresql start
# /sbin/service httpd start

Sendmail should already be installed and running, but if not, you will have to install it as well.

OK, so I said before that there are a TON of RPM's that you will have to install. These can be found at the OpenGroupWare website. Get them however you want, but if you have "wget" installed, you can use my script to fetch everything you need. You can omit the "devel" packages if you don't want to install the source code.

Ok, so now we have a directory filled up wit RPM's. Many of these have a lot of dependancies, so the order of install is important. The script below has them in the correct order, so you can either use it as a reference to install them yourself, or just save the script in the directory that has all your RPM's and run it. Your choice.

Some things to note about the install.

These all have to be done on one line or "rpm" will complain that it can's resolve dependancies:
rpm -Uvh ogo-webui-app-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm ogo-theme-default-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm ogo-webui-resource-en-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm ogo-webui-resource-de-1.1.5-r1717.0.i386.rpm

ogo-database-setup-1.1.5-0.i386.rpm sets up your PostgreSQL database and database user for you. The output should look something like this:

Preparing...                     ########################################### [100%]
1:ogo-database-setup             ########################################### [100%]
PostgreSQL seems to be already initialized
and I can see it running:
PIDS used: 3456 3458 3459
We're on PostgreSQL 7 (7.4)
checking /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf
need to patch /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf for 7.4
backup current one to /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf.20061213-153319
checking /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf
need to patch /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf for 7.4
backup current one to /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf.20061213-153319
The changes we've made require that we restart PostgreSQL...
Stopping postgresql service:    [  OK  ]
Starting postgresql service:      [  OK  ]
OK! PostgreSQL runs again: (3909 3911 3912)
creating database user: OGo
creating the database itself: OGo
we've successfully created both the user OGo and the raw database OGo
we'll now fill the database with the scheme itself
checking the logfile created during scheme rollin...
/tmp/database_setup_psql.sh.20061213-153319.log
removing log - not needed anymore

OK... Now everything is installed, and if you run the following command:

# /sbin/chkconfig --list | grep ogo

You should see the following output:

ogo-zidestore   0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off
ogo-webui       0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off
ogo-xmlrpcd     0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off
ogo-nhsd        0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

Now, let's fire up these services:


# /sbin/service ogo-zidestore start
# /sbin/service ogo-webui start
# /sbin/service ogo-xmlrpcd start
# /sbin/service ogo-nhsd start

Everything should be up and running now, so you can grab a web browser and go to the following RUL:

http://server.domain.com/OpenGroupware

You will be logged in as the root user, so make sure to change the password.

If you are using this system as a stand-alone server, you are pretty much all set. We needed to authenticate it against our central LDAP, and point it towards our IMAP server though, so I added the following lines to "/var/lib/opengroupware.org/.libFoundation/DefaultsNSGlobalDomain.plist":


LSAuthLDAPServer = "ldapserver.domain.com";
LSAuthLDAPServerRoot = "dc=mydomain,dc=com";
imap_host = "imapserver.domain.com";
UseSkyrixLoginForImap = YES;


Make sure to put these lines at the end of the file, but before the closing braces.

The file should look something like this:

###### SNIP #######
{
"skyrix_id" = "server.domain.com";
LSConnectionDictionary = {
  databaseName = OGo;
  hostName = "127.0.0.1";
  password = "";
  port = 5432;
  userName = OGo;
};
  LSNewsImagesPath = "/var/lib/opengroupware.org/news";
  LSNewsImagesUrl = "/ArticleImages";
  Languages = (
  English
);
  TimeZoneName = GMT;
  WOHttpAllowHost = (
  localhost,
  "127.0.0.1",
  "localhost.localdomain"
);
  LSAuthLDAPServer = "ldapserver.domain.com";
  LSAuthLDAPServerRoot = "dc=domain,dc=com";
  imap_host = "imapserver.domain.com";
  UseSkyrixLoginForImap = YES;
}
###### /SNIP #######

Since the system won't let you authenticate the "root" user against the local database if your are using LDAP, you have to create a root user on your central LDAP.

Create an LDIF file called root.ldif like so:

###### SNIP #######
dn: uid=root,ou=People,dc=mydomain,dc=com
objectClass: organizationalPerson
objectClass: top
objectClass: posixAccount
objectClass: shadowAccount
uid: root
uidNumber: 0
gidNumber: 0
sn: Root
cn: Root
homeDirectory: /root
loginShell: /bin/bash
gecos: Root
###### /SNIP #######

Finally, run the following command to add the root user:


ldapadd -x -D "cn=Manager,dc=mydomain,dc=com" -W -f root.ldif"


You should now be authenticating against your central LDAP server. Have fun!