Recent blog entries for samj

Just got back from Brisvegas, Queensland - headed up

there on Wednesday 6 Feb for linux.conf.au, which I found

most interesting. It was particularly refreshing to see some

progress with upcoming Samba releases -

specifically much better support for Windows 2000 and Microsoft

Active Directory (MAD as Novell like to say). It now

supports Kerberos, and Samba servers can be added to AD

domains fairly easily. winbind has also improved, allowing

PAM/NSS machines to use AD for user/group information -

which would be mostly useful for MS shops with the odd unix

box. I'm sure there's plenty of other goodies in Samba 3,

but this is the stuff I'm mostly interested in. The time

setting code was particularly cute. I find Single Sign On,

authentication, authorisation and security in general

thoroughly intriguing.

Had a good yarn to Andrew Tridgell about AD too,

specifically wrt modifying OpenLDAP to support

Active Directory. Sounds like there's a fair bit of work

involved but I'd love to see an open source implementation

so I'm planning to get stuck into this with David Elson as

soon as time permits. I would have liked to have seen the

chatter involved in adding a win2k workstation to a domain

but it insisted on talking to the DNS root servers (all of

them) and fell back onto legacy DCERPC calls. Adding NT ACL

support to OpenLDAP and making the Kerberos PACs work are

going to be interesting challenges, as is automatically

updating things like the USNs (sequence numbers).

There were plenty of other interesting talks, especially

rasmus's PHP talk, User Mode Linux, Debian Porting, oh, and

how could I forget Neil Brown's kNFSd Authentication talk

which was most interesting. It's also good to see increasing

interest in software engineering practices wrt constantly

changing APIs, bugs, etc. which is going to become

increasingly important as more companies start relying on

OSS.

Playing with NetBeans today. Have some PHP apps I want to migrate to J2EE - specifically JBoss. Looking good so far. Might have a crack at finking JBoss, Tomcat, and possibly even NetBeans later on. After I check out the boxing day sales of course.

OK, Christmas Day and the rest of the family's on the other side of the country and the girlfriend's at work. The beaches are packed and it's hot (34C) and humid here in Sydney. Thought I'd do something useful so I packaged up rdesktop 1.1.0 with Mac OS X patches for Fink. Soon enough Fink users will be able to 'apt-get install rdesktop' and access Outhouse, Orofice, etc. and other annoying proprietary win32 only applications from the comfort of OS X.

Merry Christmas!

Finally got around to submitting my netfilter hacks which add network quota support. Took longer than I would have liked to make it patch-o-matic friendly but it's done now so I'm just waiting for Harald Welte (who incidently has an almost identical Geek Code to me) to put it in. It is intended for use in a commercial internet billing system but given the flexibility of netfilter I'm sure people will find plenty of creative things to do with it.

• Cable users in Australia for example might want to keep themselves from going over the 3Gb limits imposed by the greedy telcos (esp Telstra, which is doing it's best to keep Australia in the dark ages).
• Hosting centers and ISPs may want to impose traffic caps based on agreed credit terms
• Educational institutions may want to exercise some control over students (the network equivalent of /dev/null for 1's and 0's)
• Network administrators may want to limit certain types of bandwidth (eg quake, streaming media, etc) or traffic to certain machines/MAC addresses/subnets/etc.

In other news today I've got bronchitis and accidentally took the white pills instead of the yellow pills earlier and am now buzzing away at 2am :(

Just finished uploading 40-something SquirrelMail plugin packages to the Debian servers. That'll put me in the top 10 developer s by packages maintained. Kinda cheated though since they're all related to the same project. That didn't stop Turbo Fredriksson climbing to 2nd place with all his libroxen packages though :)

Hope someone finds them useful.

You know Debian has over 5,000 source packages now? That's what makes it the best distro out there. Oh, that and apt- get.

Bored? Check out Lesbian GNU/Linux or my favourite site, FuckedCompany. Found some interesting stuff about Fire Walking. I did that once. It was fun. But not as much fun as jumping off the 134m Nevis Highwire Bungy in NZ. And I didn't get blisters from that either. I'd show you the photos but pair.com broke my account and I haven't bothered to move it to my colo servers yet. Maybe later.

TTFN

Well here goes. My first diary entry.

Now rdesktop's settled a little with the 1.1.0 release and I've got a working Debian package uploaded, I've had a bit more time to concentrate on other projects.

Like PEAR Session, a custom session handler for PHP4 which supports any database accessible using the PEAR libraries. It stores sessions in a database rather than in separate files on disk, which not only has speed and scalability advantages, but allows multiple web servers to share sessions (ie for failover and load balancing). It also includes tips on session handling, and recommends OpenWDDX be used so as sessions are also accessible from other platforms. This means you can log in using mod_perl (say) and then transparently access a PHP application. Waiting for some useful feedback so I can roll out a 1.0.0 release so if you're bored, go play and let me know what you think. Given there's been a few hundred downloads and no bug reports I figure it works.

Also packaged up bpalogin to keep Australia's Telstra Bigpond C able subscribers happy. It's a nobrainer to install, using debconf to ask for a username and password and then setting itself up to start from the boot scripts. Maybe it'll earn Debian a few more users but it really would be nice if Bigpond would consider it as a supported platform. I'm not holding my breath though. They seem fairly happy to stick with FreezePad rather than approaching Scott Campbell about his Win Cable alternative, which actually works.

Oh, and then there's SquirrelMail which I've also packaged. I've done about 10 of the 47 plugins, but I'll save the rest until I finish the package building gadget I'm working on. Debian sid users can now 'apt-get install squirrelmail' to get a clean PHP webmail client, and hopefully we'll be seeing it and its plugins in Debian's upcoming 3.0 (woody) release.

Right... off to do some real work