Journal

3 January 2004
What the hell happpened to 2003? To fill in the rather big blank since my last posting here, the day after I got handed my papers at What Everyone Wants, I was offered a new job (yahoo!) to be a proper programmer (double yahoo!).

My new employers already ran SuSe on their servers so I've now got that on my home PC, running with KDE. Now that Open office does pivot tables I never use Microsoft Windows. I'm now a convert to KDE (from Gnome) as well as to SuSe.

22 February 2003
Still no luck on the job front. Meanwhile work is getting rather repetitive. I'm trying to keep things interesting for the team's sake (or whats left of them). My home PC got root-kitted I'll write that up more fully at a later date. Since the evil little %^&*s trampled all over my system and I couldn't find the install disks, I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade to RH8.0 - I'm not overly impressed with the latest from RedHat.
Ironically the hackers got in through a vulnerability in mod_ssl which I'd set up in order to secure remote access to my home PC! The IDS picked the intrusion up easily and sent me an SMS (of course I was 200 miles away at the time and didn't have an internet connected PC at hand). Fortunately my work boxes were all either patched or don't run mod_ssl.
But back to RH8.0. When I moved our Email server to 7.2 for the Samsung Contact install last year, I had problems - I eventually discovered that Anaconda (the RH installer) couldn't cope with partitions which didn't end on a cylinder boundary. RedHat were unable to diagnose the problem, and when I did isolate it myself they denied that it was a bug. I noticed when preparing for the install that release 8.0 lists this as one of the bugs fixed. Aaaaarrrggghhhh! Where did those debian disks go!
Bowing to popular demand (well 2 Emails actually) here is sendfile the syntax is
	sendfile filename address
29 December 2002
Christmas was good and now gone. No new job yet. Part of our application software fell over this morning, but it can wait till Monday to get fixed. This particularly part is only supported on sufferance by the suppliers and is the one bit I've been trying to replace ever since I started this job. But enough sour grapes. I noticed that on my birthday, a company anounced a new product called Pushchange a quick glance suggests it does do a similar job to PushSite but its their own work.

17 December 2002
My current employers have gone into administration. 5 years of delivering reduced costs and better services, all projects delivered on time at or below budget and all targets met - at least within the IT department - makes for a sobering reminder that there is more to a business than its IT operation!
Time to look for a new job.
The annoying thing is that I'm more busy now than ever. Despite the emergency stop on the projects I was working on has left some of us quiet, but the demands of the administrators for information along with the pressures of building ad-hoc solutions to the planned upgrades is snowing me under.

4 October 2002
Looks like someone has beaten me to it in the calendaring - the latest Mozilla build now has a calendaring tool using iCal (rfc something something) as the default storage format.
Although Contact isn't quite as bad as I had thought, I'm still not comfortable with it. I've also discovered that MS-Outlook 2000 and later can use a standard FTP or webserver with FrontPage extensions (not sure about webDAV - is this the same thing?) to share Free/Busy calendaring information. i.e. we could have had all the required functionality from our orignal Email system (Linux+sendmail+pop+ldap) with only minor tweaks. Typically, Microsoft aren't shouting about that one - it really seems to be a schizophrenic organization.

Set up a PKI infrastructure using OpenSSL for the CA software. That was easy - I don't know what all the fuss is about. I'm using the excellent stunnel to provide a VPN wrapper around various services on Linux and MS Windows. I also found a nady little program called WinCrypt to use for signing files - in addition to avoiding a number of issues trying to use S/MIME with Contact, it also allows us to store signed documents easily. I've written up a quick cheat sheet for Wincrypt for the SSL Certificates HOWTO should you want to try it for yourself.
Of course I've no sooner got all this done than news breaks about the forged certificates bug in MS Internet Explorer. This also highlights the fact that WinCrypt and MS want to keep the certificate in the Microsoft certificate store while Stunnel needs to be able to read it as a file, and I want to be able to keep it on a USB memory key.
Trying to pre-empt the demands from users, I'm looking at ways of formatting / distributing reports from our legacy system. iPDF looks like it will do a lot of what we're looking for. I also added a PDF by Email printer so that users could easily generate their own PDF files.
I just put this into the smb.conf files: ...and mkpdf looks like
[PDFbyMail] comment = Convert Postscript file to PDF browseable = yes guest ok = no writable = no printable = yes print command = /usr/local/bin/mkpdf %s %U
#!/bin/bash

# Filter is called to convert ps file $1 to PDF and mail to $2

if [ -z "$2" ]; then
        exit
fi

if [ ! -f "$1" ]; then
        echo Error - job could not be completed | \
		mail -s "PDF converter error - file not found" $2
        exit
fi

ps2pdf $1 $1.pdf
/usr/local/bin/sendfile $1.pdf $2
I'll leave it to your imagination how sendfile works.
18 April 2002
The Samsung contact system is sort of installed. Unfortunately the import from /etc/passwd is a little too clever and there other problems too - mostly because its *not* Email as we know and love but X.400. I must make the time to write a better scheduling and organisation system one of these days.
Also, I got an account at SourceForge with a view to putting PushSite on there; I'm happy that the program now works properly but I'm getting a bit bored with it. It could still do with a better front end for installing and configuring it, not to mention support for other transport mechanisms (particularly scp).

12 April 2002
Most recently I've trying to upgrade a server from RH5.2 to 7.2 in order to accomodate Samsung Contact; watch this space for details of my daring deeds and cunning plans.
28 March 2002
Tried out Hancom Office. Read all about it here