The life of a programmer/system admin
How did I get here? I have been using KDE Neon for quite a while now, following my several years of using KDE : First via Redhat, then Mandrake, then Kubuntu. Neon provides much more up-to-date packages than using Kubuntu while still not being so far on the bleeding edge that …
How did I get here? We were in the process simplifying our package creation and signing pipeline, and as such we moved the signing process for the Ubuntu packages from a dedicated Ubuntu box back to the Jenkins server itself (which had the repositories mounted over NFS ). This was possible …
How did I get here? A while ago we set up a new Jenkins server in a new environment. Our previous Jenkins server had an SSL certificate signed by Comodo (issued by the client-internal certificate process). This new server s certificate was issued/signed by an organizations called Sectigo and …
Motivation Recently we were moving a portion of a site from one domain to another, and since the statistic were not going to have continuity, as far as domain name and paths go, we decided to archive the AWStats information into static files. AWStats comes with a utility called awstats_buildstaticpages …
PLEASE NOTE : This is NOT a guide for circumventing the licensing requirements of Teaching Textbooks. You will still need to purchase the product and install per the instructions. This HOWTO seeks to show a way use the products without always needing to have the CDs in the drive. This will …
Today my previously-working printer setup, with an Epson WF -3620, simply stopped working, with no error in the local Cups console other than Filter failed. Well that s not helpful. Digging in to /var/log/cups/error_log didn t provide much help initially other than GPL Ghostscript 9.18: Unrecoverable …
This is the first in what will, hopefully, become a series. I would like to highlight projects that are widely used, even to the point of being part of critical infrastructure, but are nevertheless small projects with small (often unsponsored) development teams. We start the series talking to Simon Kelley …
We depart from our normal computer geek world for a foray into the world of construction geekdom. Over the past several years, we have been remodeling our home ( see the blog posts about that ). Now it had come time to pour the radiant floor in the basement. Of course, this …
Several months ago I was setting up a FreeIPA instance for a client, and ran in to a requirement for synchronizing passwords between a legacy system and their new FreeIPA instance. To be clear, it was this legacy system which would be the authoritative source of the passwords, now, and …
The information contained in this post was gleaned while working on a project for my current employer New Context Services. By the way, we re hiring, and it s a fantastic place to work: https://www.newcontext.com/careers/ If you ve used Packer you already know it s a …
I was fortunate enough get a chance to play around with DreamHost s DreamCompute beta. In addition to being a great implementation of OpenStack , it s just fun to play with: they gave me a pretty healthy 20 CPUs, 50GB of RAM , and 5 IPs to play with, along with …
I was trying to get scanning working yesterday on my HP LaserJet 3390. However, I was hitting the dreaded message about failed to open device hpaio:/net/<my_device_here> Invalid argument I tried just about everything. I read gobs of results in Google. Some said to upgrade HP LIP , some said …
I was doing some network reconfiguration on a box recently. I was switching from a static IP setup (which was originally configured during install) to a DHCP setup. Problem was, regardless of what I did, I could not get the default route from the DHCP server to apply. I end …
We are having some issues with our LDAP server dying. This is part of an IPA setup, and it seems slapd stops accepting connections after too many queries. To debug this, I constructed a Python script to repeatedly bind and unbind to the LDAP server. I used python-ldap to do …
I lost my password to my account on a Serendipity blog recently, but still had access to the database. I did some code digging, and figured out how to reset a user s password. First, you have to figure out your install s hash key: SELECT name , value FROM s9yconfig …
A while back, I noticed KMail was starting to run really slowly, and was responsible for a few megabytes per second of disk IO (as reported by iotop). I did some google searching, and found a reference to a possible problem with importing large folders from older versions of KMail …
Today I was troubleshooting an issue with Apache and LDAP authentication via the OpenLDAP server. I had copied an existing configuration to a new system (Debian Etch to Ubuntu 10.04). Most everything was working (logins via PAM and LDAP , and the like). However, authentication via Apache s LDAP BasicAuth …
So, it appears there is no way built in to cPanel to script the creation of a large number of Mailman lists. Since we are migrating around 50 lists, I was not looking forward to a lot of copy, paste, click, etc. There had to be a better way. Turns …
I was doing some programming today (no, really?) and had need of a data structure that would return a value based on the key falling within a given range. Kind of like a dict, but each key in the dict would be two values, between which the querying key would …
Started a comment on this post but it got a little long. So, I follow Planet Python and have seen Greg Wilson s posts on the Basie project. Basie is a web-based software project forge that integrates revision control, issue tracking, mailing lists, wikis, status dashboards, and other tools that …
I am using Python to do some data file processing, converting data from a horrendously verbose, repetitive format to a nice, clean, CSV format. The date and time are in two different fields, and the date is in MM / DD / YYYY format, plus, the MM and DD might be one …
Had the need recently to generate a bunch of thumbnails for some PDFs we had. ImageMagick to the rescue. for P in ` ls *.pdf ` do echo $P outfile = "thumbs/`echo $P |cut -d . -f 1`.jpg" convert -quality 50 -geometry 64x82 $P [ 0 ] $outfile done The [0] tells it to …
Dell sent me another one of their catalogs recently, which included this entry. You can get Windows Vista, or a bonus of an Windows XP Professional downgrade. I have nothing left to add.
Bob (from marketing): I have this great new idea for our product! Joe (from engineering): Lay it on me! Bob: Let s make our product easier to use! People will love it! Joe: OK , we ll need three months to develop and test that feature. Bob: Great! We ll start …
I recently installed the Jaunty/ KDE3 .5 remix . I had some interesting issues in that I was trying to install on an existing LUKS / LVM setup. Whole-disk encryption on LVM rocks, but if the installer doesn t support it, you ll have to fiddle to get things working right. It …
Today I was trying to figure out how to ssh into one system, and then automatically ssh into another system. The logical way: ssh user@outside_host "user@inside_host" wasn t working. The logs on both inside and outside hosts would show a connection, but I would get no prompt. I …
So today I discovered that my first ever contribution to an Open Source project was accepted. Before I was let go from WordStream, my boss was having me work on a feature addition to Buildbot . I was allowed to contribute that addition, under my own name, and today that change …
So, my contract with WordStream has ended, and I am now in the ranks of the unemployed. If you know of any programming or system administration positions you could point me to, that would be greatly appreciated! My resume is linked over on the right side of this page. Feel …
I had this conversation this morning via a random AOL IM sent to me: (10:09:04) AtypicalCoho: If you respond with an away message containing a phone number, I will laugh then rickroll you by phone. (10:10:08) Me: I am not available. If you need to contact …
[The meat of this post was actually a reply to a UAF (Univeristy of Alaska Fairbanks) LUG (Linux User s Group) mailing-list thread a few months back. It s been reworked for this blog post. In addition, this post was moved from my person blog, jjncj.com where it was …
Over on his blog , Raphael Pinson has a post about creating a package with minimal dependencies. In short, make the dependencies of the package the real dependencies, not just the latest and greatest version of the package you rely on. I have been waiting way too long for someone to …
Last January, coming home from my Boston trip, I was sitting in Chicago O Hare aiport, desperately searching for free wifi, when I looked at my kernel log messages. But, what to my frustrated eyes should appear, than another example of the humor of Open Source developers, specifically, the developers …
I recently had the task of building Python Eggs on Windows that had C extensions. I did the usual googling, and found a few HOWTOs, but nothing I could find was very concise and straightforward. So, I present to you a very concise, very straightforward guide. Setting up the Build …
It s amazing the things that can cause a lump in your throat. Say, for instance, your computer not booting. Tonight I was trouble-shooting a trackball I thought to be dead, and I went to plug it in to a USB port on the front of my work computer. I …
After being out of full-time work for 17 business days, I m starting up a full time job! I m going to be doing, as I have been for the past 2.5 years, programming and system administration. My title is still in flux, but my duties will be a …
Cilk Arts is very close to releasing their multi-core programming library called Cilk++, and with it, a new license, the Cilk Arts Public License . Using this license, they attempt to close the IDO [Internal Development Organizations] loophole they believe exists with the current GPL . Namely: an organization can take a …
Yet another reason I will avoid PHP at all costs. The head developers of PHP have decided, after much discussion, to make the back-slash the name-space separator when referencing classes. Thats s right, this\is\a\tree\valid\variable. I m sorry, a back-slash? This will create no end of …
So, due to lack of projects at my current employer, I might be getting laid off come Wednesday. Not the news one wants to hear. :) If anyone has any leads for telecommuting tech jobs, please let me know. There is a link to my resume at the right of this …
As part of yearly compliance, I have to go through some sort of training on sexual harassment. (Yes, even though I work at home and can t really harass anyone.) I don t particularly mind, it s not that onerous. What I do mind, however, is having to redo sections …
Passwords are a part of life. They re needed, but they re a pain. But their ubiquity often leads users to create short, or otherwise easily-guessable passwords. Not good. I recently signed up for an account on oDesk , a site for connecting IT free-lancers and service-providers, and those looking for …
Scott Westfall has a post about defects vs. features . He notes: I like the generic term, “change request” for all changes in a system. But it’s very important to know whether it is a defect or a feature request. In my lexicon, a “defect” is something that doesn’t …
A band for programmers tired of automata: Rage Against the State Machine Thanks, I ll be here all year.
The other day, at work, we were working on setting up an automated qurk-and-dirty back up for some files from one Linux box to another. The link was a long distance one (from a data center in Dallas to our office in Anchorage). The solution was simple and elegant: On …
Original, as far as I know. Correct me if you know otherwise. Q: How do you program a computer to make beef stew? A: You use bullion logic. As bad, but not as good: Q: How do you solve a math equation involving beef stew? A: You use bullion algebra …