torand.org » Computers

I am working where?

Scott — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:13:34 +0000

So my manager was laid off along with 749 other people last month. It has taken almost a full month for my tech director to decide how to split up the team. My thoughts, as with many, is that myself and the other web technology guy would go to the Portal team and the other 4 on the team would go to another messaging team.

Everything worked out with just one hitch that has most of us scratching our heads. I was moved to Mail Storage. Me, the guy on our team with the most web technology experience is working with storage arrays. I have zero experience with storage, but over 13 years experience with web technology. Yeah that is a good fit.

When I met with my tech manager and he told me what he was going to do, he seemed genuinely shocked that I was not happy about this move. “Not happy” does not truly get across what I feel about this move, “Mad enough to spit nails” come closer, “Mad enough to look for a new job” is closer still. This is a move backward for me, I have been trying to move into more visible projects. To get myself visible outside of my division. This move goes in the opposite direction, storage is a back end process within mail. From what I see I get nothing from this move but my tech manager can say that he has fixed a problem area in our division.

I need to resolve this, it is keeping me up at night, literally check out the timestamp on this post. That is 3 AM not PM.

New Hosting Server

Scott — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:06 +0000

I moved my web and mail server to a new provider, Jaguar PC. Nothing like building a server from scratch, it can be a real time sink. It took about a week just to get the mail server up. The server itself is using Virtuozzo to setup a virtual server. This is just like running a physical server and once you are on the box you really can’t tell that it is just a small part of a larger server.

The server runs Postfix for mail, Courier-IMAP for imap, MySQL for the database, and Apache for the web server. The biggest problem that I had was with building Courier-IMAP. I took me a long while to find the right rpms for this install. Since I needed mysql support, getting the right authlib files were the biggest problem. Another problem was with the famd support. I had to build that from scratch.

Once I got the mail server done, everything else just fell into place. I hope I don’t have to move this server for a while.

Hacked!!

Scott — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 19:32:26 +0000

My site was compromised by the Linux/Lupper-F worm. Linux/Lupper-F attempts to spread by exploiting the XML-RPC for PHP vulnerability. Thankfully the worm didn’t work… It could not execute a file it copied onto my system. The file it tried to grab was ping.txt and the code tried to create a file temp2006 and execute it. The site that it initially grabed the code form was http://219.84.105.36/text.txt

I hate it when that happens

Scott — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 10:52:01 +0000

I got up early this morning to do a carrier deployment. Setup my machine… logged into the admin machines… made the edits… read the deploy notes… called into the bridge number…. no answer….

reread the deploy notes… the install is for tomorrow morning…. uugh…

..Um ok can you spell Unix?

Scott — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 16:07:04 +0000

Every so often I am asked to do technical interviews. Sometimes over the phone, sometimes in person. There are times when reading the various resumes is… well entertaining. On the whole most of the interviews I do are very technical and usually last 30-45 minutes. I also expect some resume padding and embellishment. Very rarely do I find a resume that understates the knowledge of the applicant.

This is not one of those cases….

Interviewing I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. This was one of the uglier ones. I think the major problem was with whoever screened this one.

I started the interview asking this applicant about what kind of current project they were doing. Every project they were doing, had nothing to do with the position they were interviewing for. These projects didn’t even match what was on the resume. I knew this was only going to get uglier. I asked about some basic unix questions and got back silence. This was not a good sign… Ok, I will ask some hgh level unix knowledge questions.. along the lines of what is NIS or ‘explain how mail is routed through a box’. Again got back a kind of disjointed response, and when I tried to dig for more information…. nothing.

I don’t mind doing interviews, and some I have really enjoyed and have learned more about how to do what I do. I have been on telephone interviews that have lasted for 90 minutes or more. And the applicant and I have enjoyed every minute of it. But this was like pulling teeth, without Novocaine, using rusty pliers in the hands of a blindfolded dentist.

Beating my head against the wall

Scott — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 15:07:08 +0000

You ever have one of those days where nothing works right. Well I have been having that day for the last month and a half.

I have been working on a LDAP solution on Solaris 8 and 9. This is suppose to be a proof of concept since we have specific requirements for out passwords and the software we are using right now, Power Password, has some limitations on how it is implemented and we need to explore other options. Is that vague enough?

I started with Solaris 8 and iplanet 5.1. That didn’t work and when I contacted sun support they said

“I strongly recommend installing Solaris 9. LDAP was built in to Solaris 9 from the start, it was then backported to Solaris 8. It has been my experience that it works much better in Solaris 9.”
Brandon Neill – Sun Support

Ok, we now have to upgrade all our Soalris 8 machines to Solaris 9 just to get LDAP to work? Great! Ok so I figure we will try OpenLDAP. Got the binaries, remember this is just “proof of concept”. The binaries worked but he OpenSSL software was the wrong version… ok… Grab the source and compile.

The compile of OpenLDAP went ok. Ran into some glitches, but nothing huge. Configured the software, built the Directory Information Tree (DIT), configured the schema to accept Solaris 8, configured the nessecary operating system files. Things are looking up… the ldap user cannot log into the system. Futzed with that for a couple of days before I went on to plan D. Solaris 9 install and iplanet 5.1

This was a reinstall on a test box we had. The install was fairly normal. This was the original solaris 9 from Sun, something like 2/02. The configuration of iplanet was smooth, since I had some good docs. Contrary to the prevoius installs. It took a while to get the ldapclient to work on the Solaris 8 clients since the man page doesn’t fully explain some of the gotchas. I am still havings problems with the passord configurations… so… On to plan E.

Install the latest Solaris 9 – 12/03 ….. Tune in next week….Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel…. in the continuing saga of the …. LDAP Install That Wouldn’t END….