2 Apr 2001 logic   » (Journeyer)

rblcheck:
Inching ever-closer to a working release, I now have some spiffy make rules for the docbook-ified documentation, thanks to some inspiration from the GNOME folks (make dist now does a conversion of rblcheck.sgml into assorted formats; I just need a clean text conversion now). The only things left now are a .spec and a debian directory, and possibly a set of rules for building a Solaris package. If anyone has pointers to info on building packages for their OS distribution of choice, I'd love to see it.
You know, it occurs to me that I'm really going overboard with the packaging of what amounts to a couple of hundred lines of code. Mind you, I now have a fairly nice framework for building larger projects within, so I suppose that it's just icing on the cake that rblcheck has taken advantage of it.
Work
Did a final tally of systems, and you can definitely tell we're a software house. I'm up to 33 UNIX boxes, all running radically different varieties and versions of UNIX-like OSen, with a proposal on the table for adding 9 more in the short term, and at least twice that in the longer term, with no deprecation of existing platforms. Yeesh. The next time you hear someone chanting one of the various mantras of portability, listen to them. You'll make people in my shoes a lot happier with you.
I still can't believe I'm keeping FreeBSD 2.2.8 and Slackware Linux 3.6 boxes alive for nightly builds...
Reading
Finished Cuckoo's Egg; the Epilogue covers the author's involvement with the Morris Worm (the young'uns in the crowd might need a reminder about this one), and there's a little wrap-up at the end to cover what direction his career went afterward.
Overall, an excellent dramatized retelling of a series of real incidents. I'd recommend this as required reading for those who just don't understand why people didn't think about security when designing things like Sendmail and BIND originally; it was a completely different culture, one that we've mostly forgotten in the firewall-everything, yet-another-DDOS-attack environment of today. I don't claim to relate to Stoll's 60's/70's political ideology, but it's a shame we don't all play as well together anymore.
Personal
We finally got Erica moved in this weekend, and she started her MCSE training today. I'm expecting her to come home tonight with the same wide eyes she had after her last administration training session (a one-day high-level overview of 2000 and some migration considerations); it's fun to watch. Reminds me of when I first started doing UNIX administration for a living.

Hmmm. What's with the length of my diary entries lately? A new-found sense of self-importance? ;-)

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