Using Bluetooth to synch Windows Mobile devices

Despite all my on-line searching, I couldn’t get my T60 Thinkpad running the “Thinkpad Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate software” Bluetooth stack to synchronize with my Windows Mobile 5 Cingular 8125 phone, using Bluetooth. Here’s what some other guys and I ended up figuring out today:
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KDE Auto-login woes

A few years ago, I asked SAGE whether I really needed to read the postmaster e-mail. They said yes, so I now check our postmaster e-mail. However, I use my desktop machine: I POP down the mail and then using Thunderbird’s local mail filters.

Whenever the power goes out to our building, however, my desktop reboots but it doesn’t kick off Thunderbird. To do so, I needed to set up KDE to auto-login to my machine.
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FormFusion printing with CUPS

So, we have a certain type of pre-made PCL (printer) output generated by the “FormFusion” product from eVisions. We don’t want to have two different print queues depending on the job output type, so our print server has to intelligently decide how to filter the FormFusion output.

Well, a long time ago, I figured out how to make this work with LPRng on RHAS2.1. RHEL3*, however, requires a CUPS approach.
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ServeRAID

IBM’s latest ServeRAID drivers (v 7.0) work with RHEL 3. The only problem is, their ServeRAID 7 manager has changed how ServeRAID sends SNMP traps. ServeRAID 6.1 would let you set up SNMP traps from the Raid Agent. ServeRAID 7 requires that you set up “agentx” for Net-SNMP, so that their daemon “aus-snmpd” can run…

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GTD and multiple inboxes

I have become a strong follower of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology for time management. I’ve been using the system for almost six months. I’m now experiencing the discord of having too many inboxes: my primary task list (kept in Outlook, believe it or not) work inbox Help Desk tickets Change Request tickets Microsoft…

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OpenSSL and KDE 3.5 on FreeBSD

KDE’s SSL connectivity has been broken for me for a while now. Apparently at some point KDE no longer was compatible with the “openssl” port. I run FreeBSD 5.2 but use the openssl port, so I just resort to using my laptop to get to SSL-wrapped connections. It’s kind of annoying. Well, I just got…

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Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 on Dell PowerEdge 6850

We just got a (circa 2005) Dell PowerEdge 6850, on which I now want to run (circa 2002) Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. The Red Hat Hardware Certification matrix shows the 6650 as the only certified 6000-class Dell server. This helps confirm why anaconda ends up giving me the “No valid devices were found on…

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Weird input problem with shell scripts

cat > caller.sh <<_CALLER_ #!/bin/bash echo “weird” | ./reader.sh _CALLER_ cat > reader.sh <<_READER_ : #! /bin/sh read TEST echo “Got >$TEST<” # quote is for ‘cat > reader.sh’ _READER_ chmod 755 caller.sh reader.sh ./caller.sh # prints ‘Got >weird<‘ cat caller.sh | sh # prints ‘Got ><‘ The main issue is, what is that ‘:’…

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Apache proxies and basic authentication

We use Apache proxying to redirect to a local Zope server on one of our machines. I recently turned on Apache basic authentication, and lo-and-behold the Apache credentials get passed in an “Authentication: ” header to Zope. Well, this breaks things for us, because Zope prefers the Authentication header to its fallback cookie method for…

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