Center for the Easily Distracted

I’m experimenting - I’ve found out that tech on the interwebs is advanced enough to offer me full control over my very own ‘virtual private server’ - a Xen virtual machine running Centos 5, specifically - and it’s let me install and tinker Wordpress to my desire.  Wordpress 2.5 is pretty damn slick - AJAXy and all - and better yet, it allows me to integrate with Livejournal, so I could technically move everything from LJ to my site and still keep folks up to date on such critical inanities as the state of my work life and what my bent frame thinks is funny.

So I’m testing it.  If it works, I may finally be able to have a nice hobby box without the annoying hum or the cost of SDSL.

(crossposted from The Dream Library)

Decided to take a swing at learning the State of Java Enterprise Software around middle of last week - I had free time, and I wanted to give myself a goal. Being able to program is only sort-of my goal. I don't have the smarts to be an architect, developer, and QA-tester in one body.

My goal has been to familiarize myself with the language at minimum, and learn the scope of the basic technologies. J2EE - now Java 5 EE - is a big damn toolbox, ranging from the Application Servers like Weblogic, Websphere, JBoss, and Glassfish, all the way to management APIs and parsing tools. There's a standard tool for just about everything, and it's _all_ painfully flexible; you have to wade through miles of power to get to simple things.

That's not inherently evil, just painful. I'm stuck with a lot of alphabet soup - JTA, JAXB, JAXM, JAXP, StAX, JMX, JMS, JDBC, EJB, RMI, and so on - that I want to understand enough to be able to know when the person I'm talking to is blowing smoke up my ass, at least... and at best, be able to contribute to the developers more than just the ability to tell them we won't do something.

I'm maintaining a program that surrounds and controls all these things... I wouldn't trust a mechanic who couldn't tell me why not to put diesel in an unleaded-only truck, or one who told me that when my brakes went out, I should just restart the car and hope it works.

Wish me luck... I hope my head doesn't explode.

So the DOD increased their requirements for password strength. The details are easy to code, but I was faced with the problem of _coding_ a PAM module to do the password checking; noone had a module that could be tweaked easily to match.

After much pain, I randomly happened upon a spot on the Sun site that had a collection of PAM module templates! About 20 minutes later I'd built and tested a replacement for our current (shitty) password checking module. Thank god for small miracles. That, figuring out how to get Solaris to stop encrypting passwords before sending them to LDAP, and figuring out how to get Solaris 9 to use MD5 instead of crypt mean that I can get most of our systems at least partially covered relatively easily.

Next trick: writing up a random password generator, since the new password requirements are going to tweak my brain.

*grins in manic relief* Mandatory ethics training didn't kill me. In the middle of it, though, the guy running the Teleconferencing rig from our side interrupted the speaker on the other side and said loudly, "Are we going to have an intermission sometime? Because it looks like some of us are falling asleep -" *several people try not to look pointedly at the guy who had been snoring in the middle of the room and was now trying to look like he hadn't been* "- and may not realize that you can still see them when the slides are up..."

Other than that, it was remarkably boring, other than highlighting the fact that interactions between the government and contractors are pretty tightly circumscribed by law.

In other news, I finally got around to finishing the tortuous bit of logic that is the local-to-LDAP authentication conversion script. 610 lines of barely-passable Perl. I need to program more often.

Next up - a script to go through and make sure that the auto-home directories are all correctly chowned and chmodded. This one seems likely to be much simpler.

This is definitely the biggest challenge I've had in my system administration career.

I have to come up with an algorithmic method to convert a system from using its current nameservices to using my new LDAP server. The old system may use both local accounts and an old central naming service. I have to remap all G/UIDs on the system in question to fit my new criterion - local accounts that're staying local below ID 1000, local accounts that're moving to LDAP getting removed from the local passwd file, old remote accounts simply getting remapped.

Trying to keep the whole project straight in my head is, in fact, causing me head pains.