Tom at 16

Week of July 22nd, 2002

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Thursday July 25, 2002

Spent some time "porch sitting" tonight; just sat there and watched the storm clouds roll in. It's still about 85 degrees, so things are ripe for a thunder and lightening show in the wee hours. A little rain would be nice. Cool things off a bit... make the vegetable garden happy... make the grass happy...

I think I finally have an LDAP directory layout I'm happy with. I decided to start simple:

	dn: dc=syroidmanor,dc=com
		ou=users
		ou=contacts
		ou=machines

Tomorrow night I'll start populating the contacts tree with a few basics -- common name (cn), surname (sn), givenname, and email -- then test for a few days. The nice thing about LDAP is you can make allowances for future expansion and attributes but they're not actually recognized by the server until you add values. For example, I've added a tree for machines, but I won't put any values there until I get down the road toward a SPOA (single point of authentication); having an organization unit that has no attributes assigned to it means the LDAP server simply ignores its presence. The more I work with LDAP, the more I see tremendous potential in its flexibility and extensibility.

I'm beat. Time to hit the pillow.

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Wednesday July 24, 2002

Apologies for the scant posts of late -- I've been just a tad busy.

For the last 48 hours I've been reading everything I can lay my hands to on securing dynamic content under Apache. I have to write an article for devWorks on the topic, and while I know enough to get by, I don't want to miss anything important. I've also been researching specs on a server for a potential project, cleaning up the final copy edits on the LDAP tutorial I finished last week, and in my spare time (heh-heh) I'm building an LDAP database to hold all my contact info. The latter is a bit tricky. There are scripts out there to build a contacts database for me, but they're either buggy or single-purpose. I eventually want to store more than just contact info in my LDAP store, so I have to be careful how I design the structure. After messing about with several different approaches, I've decided to build everything by hand, from the command line. At least until I get a workable structure I'm happy with.

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Monday July 22, 2002

I forced myself to avoid all things computer-related this weekend. Last week was hectic, and I put in several very long days. By late Friday it was pretty evident I was nearing burn-out; everything was a "chore" and took three times longer than it should. So I powered my notebook down, closed the lid, and put it away. It retrospect, my decision was a good one (although I don't mind telling you, I had to fight off the urge to check email on several occasions). This morning I actually fell half-assed refreshed and looking forward to the day ahead.

I spent the weekend mucking about in the garden, watching TV, and cooking -- Saturday night we made gnoshe (potatoe pasta); Sunday night we cooked up a wonderful moose roast.

Today I've got to attend to some system maintenance (Leah's box needs a YANTI, my development box needs a clean RH install), and attend to any copy edits to the article I finished last week. Be well everyone...

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