I just read a terrific article entitled “The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature” by “feral information theorist” Thomas Scoville. In it, Scoville proposes that UNIX has a certain appeal to literary types because of its reliance on text rather than image, and that the GUI has really been successful because we live in an [...]
When last we visited this issue I had just gotten the venerable Joomla CMS to authenticate to our LDAP server. I decided to build a replica of our existing CMS, which is based on the Mambo core, and do some testing to see how easy it would be to port to our LDAP-saavy Joomla core. [...]
There’s a lot you can do in the Terminal in Mac OS X. It’s often the most expedient method of achieving a given task. But I always get stuck when it comes time to make certain network settings via the command-line. For instance, in the lab all our machines are on Built-In Ethernet, and all [...]
Let me just say up front, historically I’ve been terrible about backing up my data. But I’m working on it. As far as backups go, I’ve tried a lot of things. I am responsible for backups of staff data at work, and here is where the bulk of my trials have occurred. For my personal [...]
So far we’ve hit only one very minor snag in our migration to a single, unified authentication server for Mac, Windows and Linux. Since Mac and Linux behave so similarly with regards to authentication — in fact, I’d say they’re practically identical — and since Windows is so utterly, infuriatingly different, you can expect most [...]
So, our primary authentication server, which will be used to enable network home accounts for our entire internal network — Mac, Windows and Linux — is up and running. I’ve installed it in our server room, put it on the KVM, and switched over all the workstations. So far, so good. (My fingers are so [...]
Of course I knew it was too good to be true. I’ve found the first fatal flaw in my plan to unify authentication on the internal network. It goes back to the Windows quotas problem I studied some time ago, and to which I’d thought I’d found a solution. I won’t go into great detail [...]
So it’s the last week during which students have access to the lab, and that means I can finally implement my plan to unify internal network user authentication. Finally! I’m so jazzed. I’ve been waiting for months (well, years, really) for the chance to do this, and it’s here at last. The general outline of [...]
So I’ve been examining what we have, and thinking about what we want, and thinking about how to get there with regards to external network unification. Here’s what we have: A mail server running FreeBSD and getting user info from it’s own, local DB A web and FTP server running same, getting user info (I [...]
Okay, this will be a quickie. Really. I use for loops in scripts all the time, but for chokes on files with spaces in the name. After years of finding ways to avoid this problem any way I could, I’ve finally found what I believe to be the solution. The for command treats any whitespace [...]