Liberty Systems & Software

Just a quick post today - here's a great article from Cory Doctorow on his computing experiences with Ubuntu and Lenovo ThinkPad X series.

It must be the week for stupid error messages.  I just tried to create a private SSL certificate for one of our server VMs from our Novell eDirectory iManager server.  The CSR was created by OpenSSL on the command line on the Ubuntu server, and i copied it to my laptop with the filename "req".  When i tried to issue the certificate through iManager > Novell Certificate Server > Issue Certificate, it gave me the singularly unenlightening error:

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Last week i made some fairly significant changes on a client's production firewall/routing cluster during our maintenance window.  The next morning there were reports of file server drives not connecting correctly and inaccessible web sites.  Because all wireless-to-wired and Internet traffic goes through this cluster, the firewall changes were the obvious culprit.  Looking at the logs it turned out we had run out of space in the connection tracking table:

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The Register has a review of the Ubuntu 11.04 beta release which suggests there are some rocky times for existing Ubuntu users ahead.  The part the article that stuck out to me reads:

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Today we have a guest blog post from my wife Angela.  She is an avid Ubuntu user (in fact, so are our kids) and a great web researcher in general.  She wanted to borrow digital editions of books from our local library; however, the books are only available in the form of digital handcuffs.  So she set herself the task of getting Adobe Digital Editions (DE) working on Ubuntu lucid.  Without further ado, here's her story:...

I recently started using Observium (a great network monitoring package which you should use), and found that i had some useful patches to contribute fairly soon afterwards.  I submitted a patch to enable bulk selection of checkboxes in JavaScript and it was initially rejected, in part because i included my own copyright header on a new file.

(I used to love Stan Kelly-Bootle's column in Unix World, so i thought i'd share an experience a little like the ones he used to write about.  Hope some old-timers out there can get into it...)

The task i was working on involved taking a file containing a very large directory listing (about 158 MB) and determining the total size of all the files listed in it.  The file's contents looked like this:

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This morning i migrated NTPmon's source code from a private Subversion repository to a public repository hosted on Github.  Many thanks to the folks at Pro Git and Github for making the learning and migration process so smooth!

"Cloud computing was built for suckers by hustlers."
    -- Ted Dziuba

This is here just so nisshh can check it out...  :-)