Tom's Insights - Week of 1/28/02

Week of January 28th, 2002

Most Recent : January 29th, 2002
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Monday January 28, 2002

Greetings. Hope your week is off to a good start... It's been deathly cold here the past four or five days (-30 to -40C); the weather reports keep telling us it's going to warm up tomorrow, but like that old saying, tomorrow never comes. Bother. I'm definitely getting waayyy to old for this Arctic shit. And to think I used to routinely chop wood in -40 temperatures without wearing a coat. Not so no more. Takes me 5 minutes to bundle up just to go out and start the car.

I've been very busy learning all kinds of new "stuff", primarily for several articles/tutorials I'll be writing over the course of the next few months. The first will be a tutorial on building and configuring a Samba PDC. The next release of Samba (which will be 2.2.3) is very close to release -- yes, I know, I've said that before... And given that one of the major code rewrites has to do with PDC functionality, I've been downloading daily snapshots from the CVS tree and testing things 8-ways to Sunday (or whatever that popular phrase is). I've also been closely monitoring the Samba mailing list and picking up what I can in terms of configuration variation so I can cover the bases well.

I've also got OpenLDAP running on the server, and I've learned how to interface it with Samba for authentication. Ideally, as I stated last year, I want all program authentication data stored solely in LDAP. I've got to learn more about schemas, but I'll get there over time. I've also learned how to get Kerberos up and running, and interfaced with Samba. I haven't figured out how to grant myself a ticket, though, so I'd say I have a ways to go on this project.

Phoenix is sick, and getting worse by the day. It used to spontaneously reboot about once a day, for no apparent reason. Now I can make it reboot almost at will by running any kind of disk intensive task -- compiling a program, running an 'ls' on a big directory, or doing an rsync. Almost. Every now and then the system trips me up and continues chortling away like nothing's wrong. Yes, I've traded out RAM chips. I'm pretty sure something's gone astray with the MB; I don't know what else to try.

Several people have asked when I'm going to move my site to PHP-Nuke. Probably when 5.4.1 is released. Version 5.4 is relatively stable, but it's still got a few bugs, and I've finally, finally learned not to run production stuff on dot-zero releases.

Be well.

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Tuesday January 29, 2002

There is at least one good thing about living in -35º temperatures -- there's no problem keeping the beer cold. I put a couple beer on the back porch about two hours ago. I just brought them in and the glass immediately frosted perfectly. Heh. Take that all you people porch-sitting in 70º sunny-side-up temps. Bleh.

I'm very close to being estatic tonight. Brian Cheesman wrote me yesterday and suggested I try a different power supply in my "spontaneously rebooting" server, Phoenix. Somewhere, way back in the darkness of the past several weeks, I remember someone else suggesting the same thing. I didn't necessarily brush the idea off, but I didn't give the notion a lot of weight given I had a reasonably new, and reasonably high-quality (Antec) power supply in the box. But after the hair pulling of the past few weeks, I though -- WTF; I have a spare PS in the cupboard, why not give it a go? I did, and it did, and it hasn't hiccuped since early this morning. I've compiled several different bits of code, rsync'd my mail store from Hydras over to the box (almost guaranteed to cause a reboot), pummelled the filesystem with everything I've got, and lo-and-behold, the system is still up and working as advertised. Go figure. I'm certainly not ready to thank the Computer Gods for a resolution to my problem just yet, but if it's still running tomorrow night...

Today I found myself buried deep in LDAP schemas, the specific steps necessary to authenticate a Samba server against an LDAP store, and... well... a partridge in a pear tree. Life goes on. I'm currently in the process of sucking down the latest Samba 2.2.3pre CVS and when that's done, I'll compile it into form. I have it on pretty good rumor that Samba 2.2.3 will make an appearance this week. The code's tightening up quite nicely.

Follow the Linux kernel development? Want an insightful read? Try this: A modest proposal..." Worth the read.

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Wednesday January 30, 2002

I've been playing fisty-cuffs with LDAP for most of the day. There's no clear winner yet; I'm a tenacious opponent . If anyone knows anything about SASL, I'd appreciate your insights.

Weather remains cool. OK, weather remains BLOODY COLD. But to the best of my knowledge, no one gained any leverage on the weatherman (weatherperson??) by begin loud and outspoken.

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