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!

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm using VMware Workstation 4.5.2 on Windows.

I'm going to SANE next week! I'm really excited.

I hit upon bug 85346:
in RHAS2.1, if you're packaging a bunch of files that don't
have an owner known to the OS, you will get

getUname: too many uid's

The simple solution was to add a

chmod -R root:root $RPM_BUILD_ROOT

to the %install section.

Date: Tuesday September 21, 04

I was getting some weird errors yesterday in my first
attempt to automate a Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 install. There were
lots of errors like...

attempt to access beyond end of device

I added an option to the PXE loader:

ramdisk_size=65536

and it works now.

Listen to the wisdom: http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-software/200408/msg00372.html.