inna di red

Spring break was quiet at ResTek.  I haven’t been into the office much.  I guess because I like to work from home more, where I have my own computer and access to as much coffee as I would like.

I had to buy a new french press (accidentally broke the last one that I got for Christmas, ouch) so I bought the Bodum Kenya model because it wasn’t as expensive as the Chambord (original — $40!).

On Wednesday I took a train down to Seattle to help my dad with some things at his business and ran into Symons across the street from the store.

Work has been uneventful, but I managed to finish the Perl script that I use to add new accounts.  It’s a lot more user-friendly now (view groups before selecting one, allow you to enter name or number, deal with non-ResTek accounts, etc.)  In addition to that, I extended our password-reset application.  It now supports changing more of your LDAP information such as phone numbers, email addresses, name, and login shell which means people don’t have to use phpldapadmin (they still can).  I broke away from using our current Staff class which encompasses employee information in doing so, but since Zend_Ldap is going to be extended soon (I hope!) I have plans to convert all of our PHP LDAP code to a consistent interface in the near future anyway.

Debian with VirtualBox (+Vista)

A while back I was talking to a friend and our discussion convinced me to install Linux (or something else) on my desktop.  I decided to give Debian another go, and I’ve been really happy with it.  I’ve had it on my laptop for quite a while, and now it’s on my desktop too.  The same discussion led to me installing VirtualBox, and I added 2GB more ram (making 4GB total) to my desktop to give my virtual machine(s) more memory.

When the time comes to buy a new laptop, I’ll probably use the same setup.

Finals Week

The end of another quarter is approaching which means finals are coming up. I’ve got 2 on Monday (Business and Its Environment, and Business Database Development) and another on Thursday (Telecommunications). The week before finals, known as “dead week”, turned out to be just an extension of finals week. I had a final for the lab portion of my database class, and another in MIS 495 — my capstone course — on Thursday, and a project due Friday. It’s been a busy quarter. It does look like I’m set to graduate this summer though.

I’m registered for next quarter:

• Computer-mediated communications
• Network Administration
• Humanities of Islamic Civilization
• Gender and Society

Pretty diverse schedule now that I have most of my major out of the way.

The world of ResTek has been quiet. One of the two new developers is leaving WWU at the end of this quarter, leaving only one (Symons and Ben are gone after this quarter). The servers are pretty easy to maintain and with zero budget to work with, I don’t have much to work with in the hardware upgrade realm.

I’d like to repartition the servers over break, since the current space allocation isn’t ideal. The database server, for example, needs more space for /var.

I haven’t broken anything too terribly in a while, but I did render our logserver useless for a while:


OpenBSD 4.5 (GENERIC) #1749: Sat Feb 28 14:51:18 MST 2009


I used the first 4.5 snapshots to do so. When I upgraded the kernel and rebooted, I lost access. When I finally made it down to Bond Hall on Monday, the problem became clear. None of the network interfaces had been created because ifconfig(8) was out of sync with the new kernel due to some of the changes in 4.5. I extracted the new ifconfig(8) from base45.tgz of my snapshot and that fixed the problem. I later learned that a page for upgrade45.html exists even though 4.5 is not yet released — I’ll be following a process more similar to the one mentioned therein from now on when using snapshots.

Snapshots can be more interesting than supported upgrades between releases and that’s why I like them. They’re also relatively painless for the most part when you read about the changes made between releases (current.html, plus45.html).

I’m excited to see what kind of impact the pfsync improvements will have on our firewalls.