borwick's blog

Using Bluetooth to synch Windows Mobile devices

borwick — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 13:03:15 -0700

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:

KDE Auto-login woes

borwick — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:47:06 -0700

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.

Can't print from FreeBSD/CUPS to Windows XP's "TCP/IP Print Server" with a HP PSC 1350

borwick — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 06:14:42 -0700

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.

FormFusion printing with CUPS

borwick — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 09:01:14 -0700

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.

ServeRAID

borwick — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:10:51 -0700

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.

GTD and multiple inboxes

borwick — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:05:15 -0800

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!

OpenSSL and KDE 3.5 on FreeBSD

borwick — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 19:09:47 -0800

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.

Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 on Dell PowerEdge 6850

borwick — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 19:10:52 -0800

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.

Weird input problem with shell scripts

borwick — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 22:27:48 -0800

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.

Apache proxies and basic authentication

borwick — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:17:05 -0700

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.

Debugging code dependent on Net::LDAP

borwick — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 19:49:50 -0700

Well, we had a weird problem in some code that updates LDAP, and I wanted to be able to debug it without actually updating LDAP. You could set up a throwaway LDAP database with your schema and some test data... or override Net::LDAP.

Dummy Net::LDAP (wfu.edu) is the solution. Its only methods are "new", "code", "count", and "AUTOLOAD". Yay!

MailScanner and spamassassin

borwick — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:52:00 -0800

I've set up a small test group of administrators to get their email filtered via MailScanner and spamassassin. I tuned MailScanner as little as possible.

Our goal is to delete 40% of spam. Going from no content filtering straight to a "drop email" system is a little intimidating.

My only false positives so far have come from automated tools: NCSU has a Matt's Script Archive script that mailed me, and our calendar server emails people about schedule changes. I don't know if blocking MSA scripts is OK, because I guess the reasoning is the programming is bad enough that people can use them for spam. I'm eventually going to whitelist all our domains, but for testing I want to see all the possible false positives.

upgraded FreeBSD desktop

borwick — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 13:47:00 -0800

At work, the only *BSD computer I know of is my trusty IBM NetVista desktop, which I use to check mail--and all the sundry things that one needs to do that one cannot do very well with Windows.

Every few months, I decide I need to upgrade all my ports (because "portaudit" complains), or I need to upgrade the OS. Most recently, I've upgraded from RELENG_5_2_1 to RELENG_5_3. I used to try to portupgrade at the top of every month, but every time I mess with the environment I throw a day of work away. Something always breaks.

Most recently, the ports system switched from using XFree86 by default to xorg. That was a fun upgrade. I ended up having to run everyone's favorite: "portupgrade -fa", which forces a reinstallation of every package on the machine. Kontact still won't run; I'm running "portupgrade -fR kdepim3" just in case the first full reinstall didn't catch something.

There and back again: printconf and file types

borwick — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:47:09 -0800

We are doing business with a vendor, eVisions, which has a product called FormFusion or FormsFusion. Their product generates output suitable for printers to parse. The only problem is, printconf on Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 thinks that FormFusion output is "ASCII text (with escape sequences)," and our PostScript print queues happily render the data into line-noise.

JInitiator and Firefox

borwick — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 20:29:58 -0800

McGill University has documentation about installing JInitiator for Firefox, necessary to use SCT's "Internet Native Banner" product.