Despite all my on-line searching, I couldn't get my T60 Thinkpad running the "Thinkpad Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate software" Bluetooth stack to synchronize with my Windows Mobile 5 Cingular 8125 phone, using Bluetooth. Here's what some other guys and I ended up figuring out today:

A few years ago, I asked SAGE whether I really needed to read the postmaster e-mail. They said yes, so I now check our postmaster e-mail. However, I use my desktop machine: I POP down the mail and then using Thunderbird's local mail filters.

Whenever the power goes out to our building, however, my desktop reboots but it doesn't kick off Thunderbird. To do so, I needed to set up KDE to auto-login to my machine.

For the last six months, I have tried on and off to get my FreeBSD desktop machine to print to my IBM Thinkpad laptop's USB-connected HP PSC 1350.

So, we have a certain type of pre-made PCL (printer) output generated by the "FormFusion" product from eVisions. We don't want to have two different print queues depending on the job output type, so our print server has to intelligently decide how to filter the FormFusion output.

Well, a long time ago, I figured out how to make this work with LPRng on RHAS2.1. RHEL3*, however, requires a CUPS approach.

IBM's latest ServeRAID drivers (v 7.0) work with RHEL 3. The only problem is, their ServeRAID 7 manager has changed how ServeRAID sends SNMP traps.

ServeRAID 6.1 would let you set up SNMP traps from the Raid Agent. ServeRAID 7 requires that you set up "agentx" for Net-SNMP, so that their daemon "aus-snmpd" can run and talk to Net-SNMP.

It's a great idea, just that I don't know how to test it. If you snmpbulkwalk on 'adaptec', the MIB tree, you get the adaptec MIB version, but no other information. There's no way to send a test SNMP trap.

IBM hardware support doesn't support the OS manager, and software support costs money.

I have become a strong follower of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology for time management. I've been using the system for almost six months.

I'm now experiencing the discord of having too many inboxes:

• my primary task list (kept in Outlook, believe it or not)
  
• work inbox
  
• Help Desk tickets
  
• Change Request tickets
  
• Microsoft Project project plans
  
• Excel documents

I really feel like I should write a bunch of converters to merge all this stuff with my primary task list. I'm driving myself crazy because each system has its own set of priorities, so an email to me sometimes gets better response than a Help Desk ticket to me! Argh!

KDE's SSL connectivity has been broken for me for a while now. Apparently at some point KDE no longer was compatible with the "openssl" port. I run FreeBSD 5.2 but use the openssl port, so I just resort to using my laptop to get to SSL-wrapped connections. It's kind of annoying.

Well, I just got a new machine to replace my old desktop, so I'm building out FreeBSD 6.0 on it. This machine is using the built-in openssl rather than the port. And guess what? After spending two days compiling KDE 3.5, I found out that the built-in library is also
incompatible with KDE 3.5.

So, now I'm rebuilding the whole thing (portupgrade -fR kde) having added "WITH_OPENSSL_STABLE=yes" to /etc/make.conf and built openssl-stable.

We just got a (circa 2005) Dell PowerEdge 6850, on which I now want to run (circa 2002) Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1.

The Red Hat Hardware Certification matrix shows the 6650 as the only certified 6000-class Dell server.

This helps confirm why anaconda ends up giving me the "No valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems" error.

cat > caller.sh <<_CALLER_
#!/bin/bash

echo "weird" | ./reader.sh
_CALLER_

cat > reader.sh <<_READER_
:
#! /bin/sh

read TEST
echo "Got >\$TEST<" # quote is for 'cat > reader.sh'
_READER_

chmod 755 caller.sh reader.sh
./caller.sh
# prints 'Got >weird<'
cat caller.sh | sh
# prints 'Got ><'

The main issue is, what is that ':' doing on the first line of
reader.sh? When it's gone, things work correctly.

We use Apache proxying to redirect to a local Zope server on one of our machines. I recently turned on Apache basic authentication, and lo-and-behold the Apache credentials get passed in an "Authentication: " header to Zope. Well, this breaks things for us, because Zope prefers the Authentication header to its fallback cookie method for authentication.

I am now searching for a way to strip headers from Apache proxying, or a way to turn off basic authentication for Zope.