Julian C. Dunn

I finally got my FreeBSD laptop to authenticate to the company’s WAP 54G wireless access point. It turns out that the problem was with the Linksys firmware! I spent two days futzing with FreeBSD and trying to figure out why the iwi card wouldn’t associate with the access point, and finally in frustration I flashed the WAP54G’s firmware to version 3.04 (from version 2.08), even though the release notes said nothing about fixing WPA association. And it worked!

I guess this is what happens when you buy consumer-grade devices.

Today has been a day for hacking mail infrastructure. First, I arrived at the office at 8 a.m. to cut over our old RedHat 7.3-based SMTP gateway to a new Fedora Core 4 virtual machine. The purpose of this box (or VMWare GSX Server guest, in our case) is to act as a final sanity check before inbound e-mail hits Microsoft Virus Exchange Server. Previous admins were smart enough to realize that once a virus hits Exchange it will spread like wildfire, so there needs to be a special box placed in front of Exchange to scan for viruses.

The new setup is similar to the old setup, but with updated packages. The machine runs Postfix with amavisd-new as the content_filter, and any clean messages are passed over the internal LAN to the Exchange server. We’re using ClamAV as the antivirus scanner.

I encountered one problem while cutting this over which is that clamd likes to drop privileges right after starting, and I’d forgotten to set AllowSupplementaryGroups in the clamd configuration file. This meant ClamAV couldn’t read any of the temporary spool files written by amavis.
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I started subscribing to the freebsd-mobile mailing list now that I’m running FreeBSD on my ThinkPad T42. Unfortunately, we use Microsoft [Virus] Exchange at work, so I read my e-mail using Evolution using the Exchange Connector.

I was amused to see that it’s possible to hijack the status line in both Outlook for Windows (the thick client) and OWA (Outlook Web Access). Some enterprising soul has figured out that Microsoft inserts an X-message-flag pseudo-header into any e-mail that it wants to specially flag, even if that message never originally contained the header.

This has amusing results:

You can see how the culprit executes this little trick by viewing the raw message source.

I finally gave up on SUSE Linux 10 on my ThinkPad T42 from work.

There were a number of reasons for doing so, but in general I just found that everything was far too complicated and had too many GUI layers and layers of abstraction upon layers of abstraction, such that I couldn’t actually do anything on the box without fear of breaking it.

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As a follow-up to my last post about poor usability in Windows, I discovered that VMWare is guilty of usability problems, too. Take a look at this dialog box which appears during the creation of a virtual machine:

Huh? I looked at this and thought, how on earth can elect to only use a virtual IDE adapter? Apparently this functionality comes later:

Would it have been too hard to do the following?

Select an adapter type:

IDE
SCSI (BusLogic Driver)
SCSI (LSI Logic Driver)

Then you wouldn’t even need to ask the second question about the virtual disk type.

On a related note, some VMWare users are dumb enough that they’ll try anything.

At my new company I unfortunately have to deal with Active Directory. I understand that AD is supposed to be the authoritative source for any information about users, groups, computers, and so on, but does the interface have to be so crammed with junk?

This has got to be the worst interface I’ve ever seen (Lotus Notes aside, but I’ve never had to administer Notes). It’s not clear where to find anything! Not only is the interface kludgy (multiple rows of tabs?) but the tab labels are totally non-intuitive. Why are there at least four tabs pertaining to e-mail (Microsoft Exchange)? What the heck is the Member Of tab for, and how does that differ from what I might find under Account?

I can’t imagine trying to administer hundreds of users with this kludgy tool. Thank God our company is only < 50 people.

I finally decided to replace my FreeBSD-based Sun Ultra 10-based home router. There were a couple of reasons for this:

1. I was running FreeBSD 5.x, which meant that the keyboard wouldn’t work — I could only control the system remotely over SSH or through a serial console. This was fixed in later versions of FreeBSD 5.x but I didn’t want to bother upgrading, since the box isn’t the fastest machine
2. Using a desktop workstation for routing and running ppp consumes more power than it’s worth, and makes a fair amount of noise
3. Using an 400 MHz UltraSparc III-based workstation with 512 MB of ECC RAM for a simple firewall and router seemed like a bit of overkill
4. I want to free up the Ultra 10 for testing out Solaris 10 and possibly upgrading my Solaris 9 SCSA designation.
5. I want to (finally!) equip my home with wireless… yes, I’m a little late getting on the bandwagon.

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