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January 2002 Archives

January 21, 2002

It's going to be a good one!

  • Well, it's another year, and I feel like this one's going to be a good one. Been back in Ottawa for a while now, and been fairly busy. Work's been keeping me out of mischief, and we haven't even been out to see many movies recently.
  • On the wedding front, plans are coming along well. We've ordered our invitations, we've started our registry, and booked our limo. Thanks to Mom, we've also ordered our bonbonieres.
  • I posted my first bugtraq message!
  • Started reading "The Practice of System and Network Administration", a very interesting and practical book, written by at least one well known member of SAGE.
  • On the home computing front, I've upgraded some of my home systems to Windows XP, which is surpsingly good. It's the first version of Windows that I can justify paying for. There are a number of side projects on the go at home too: getting The Chungs website up and running, and setting up Postfix for secure remote SMTP relaying. After discovering that Rogers now requires SMTP AUTH to send mail via their servers using a non @rogers.com domain, I tested it out. Only to find that they only support SMTP AUTH LOGIN, not CRAM-MD5, STARTTLS, or SSL, and so all my credentials travel across the network in the clear. Not only that, but the same credentials used for SMTP AUTH are used for POP authentication, so not only could people send mail to anyone as me, but also read any and all of my rogers.com mail. No thank you! I'll continue to use my own secure servers.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on January 21, 2002 1:00 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    IMAP/TLS with Courier-IMAP

  • After some reading, I finally understand how TLS works, as it relates to IMAP and POP. I've reconfigured the EG IMAP server to allow TLS over the standard IMAP port 143, as opposed to just IMAPS (IMAP/SSL on port 993).
  • The Outlook family doesn't support IMAP/TLS, only IMAP/SSL, however, Eudora, and trusty Mutt both understand and speak IMAP/TLS.
  • One day when I have lots of money to burn, I'll invest in a real SSL certificate. :)

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on January 21, 2002 11:57 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    January 31, 2002

    Wanted: SysAdmin. :)

  • Kim was here last week, from Tuesday 'till Sunday, and it was a good time. Mostly I was working, but Kelly had a chance to spend lots of time with her, since she stayed with us. Kelly and Kim were shopping for bridesmaid's dresses, and have some leads, but nothing solid yet!
  • Thursday, while doing some web tree cleanup, I removed a directory symlink, and woke up Friday morning to find out that a script that attempted to CD into that directory and chmod/chgrp a whole bunch of files couldn't. Not only could it not chdir into that directory, but it started off in '/', and proceeded to chmod/chgrp every file on the server's filesystem without checking that it was in the right place first. :(. Thank you to RPM for having "rpm --setugids --setperms -a". That managed to recover a large percentage of filesystem ownership and permissions. Took about a day to get the system back to a running state.
  • Just prior to that, I was working on getting the new version of Geeklog set up. I also wanted to get Gallery v1.25 integrated into the look and feel of the Enfusion Group website, and also administered using the Geeklog administration system, including Geeklog's groups. The end result of this is here, and a HOWTO of what I did, with John Holmes help is here.
  • Speaking of Enfusion Group site updates, I also restricted MP3 access on EG to users who are logged in and part of the MP3 group. As part of the maintenance, I also abstracted some of my EG site specific code out, so that future Geeklog updates will be easier to integrate with.
  • Lastly, I finally managed to update Mailman to 2.0.8.
  • Next week, I'm writing the LPI level 1A and 1B certifications, which should be easy, but I need to write in order for LPI to issue my level 2 certification that I already passed.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on January 31, 2002 12:07 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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    About January 2002

    This page contains all entries posted to adrian's home in January 2002. They are listed from oldest to newest.

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