(I’m still writing my article on setting up zones under Solaris 10. Bear with me while I assemble all the relevant details)
I just got hit by this bug:
Transition patching (-t option) is not supported in a zones environment.
Basically, you can’t patch a system with non-global zones installed without manually hacking an rc script! As the last comment in the thread says, “Hmm, the thing that most concerns me is that a bug that obvious should have been found in even the most cursory testing.”
Recently we purchased a Sun Fire v210 server with a pair of 73GB drives. The Sun Fire doesn’t come with a RAID controller on board and I wasn’t interested in paying Sun another $1000 to install one, since the machine is primarily for development, so I decided to set up Sun Volume Manager (a/k/a Logical Volume Manager, or LVM) to mirror the drives. Continue reading
Today I’m going to write about why project managers are almost universally loathed by technical staff. Let me begin with a Dilbert cartoon which illustrates the sentiment:
Sadly, my experience in the technology sector has only reinforced my negative perception of project management. In this essay, I’m going to describe those negative experiences, explain what I think are the pre-requisites for project management to not suck, and then conclude on a bit of a downer by explaining why I don’t think those pre-requisites are likely to be fulfilled any time soon.
… since I have to grudgingly administer some Windows boxes, I’m finding this site pretty valuable. For example, someone asked me this morning if we have inbound and outbound message size limits in Exchange. This article explains how to find that information!
This is the funniest spam I’ve seen in a while:
I noticed your Internet resume and would like to send you an email .
Please let me know if that is OK ?
3dnet@drost.us withYES as subject
It’s a little late to be asking me if it’s ok to be spamming me, huh?
First off, I have to be honest about my biases: I am not a big fan of MySQL. It has a long list of gotchas; in many cases, it violates what I term “the principle of least surprise”. One quick example: what is the difference between this:
$ mysql -h localhost -u root mysql
and
$ mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u root mysql
?
Answer: The first command will use the local domain socket (mysql.sock) to connect to the database, and the latter will actually open a TCP/IP connection to localhost.
Why this is relevant will become clear in a moment.
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.
Continue reading
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.
