How not to do LDAP authentication

So we have an application where $vendor’s product hooks into ldap for authentication and authorization. This is a good thing as we can authorize people for different roles based on settings in ldap. However $vendor’s implementation leaves a bit to be desired as the way it works is that the first time a user logs…

Continue reading

Vendor issues continued

So after $vendor sent a person onsite for 3 days to fix our problems last week, we find that the problems are still not fixed and in fact are worse. I dutifully open up a new ticket and cc the support manager, my local VAR, and the person that came on site. A few hours…

Continue reading

Funny bit with a vendor

I have been having a lot of problems with $vendor (contact point is named Steve) who sold me a system that does not work well via a local VAR. I have been very happy with the local VAR (contact is Bob) and am even more happier after the following phone conversation:
Continue reading

A bit more about me and system administration

I gave an interview to http://myfootpath.com/advice-and-answers/career-interviews/systems-administrator-career-interview/ a while ago. Gives a bit more background on who I am and what I think about System Administration.

Firefox 4 and IE 8 show blank pages

I ran into a interesting problem with an internal web application I built several years ago. It would only show a blank page in IE8 and above and in Firefox 4 and greater while other versions of IE8 and Firefox showed the page correctly. There were no errors on the newer browsers. After a bit…

Continue reading

2011 Candidate Statement: Ski Kacoroski

I have enjoyed serving you for the past 2 years and would be honored to serve for 2 more years. Two years ago I said

“They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well it takes a community to create a good system admin. A community that provides training, mentoring and ethical guidance; career path resources such as job boards, certifications, and leadership opportunities; business resources such as insurance, legal, and advertising; advocating for its members with local and national governments; and face to face meetings to create a web of trust amoung its members. A community that benefits society by being the go to resource on system administration issues, certifying that its members have a basic level of competency, and creating a larger web of trust with other groups in society. I feel that LOPSA is that community. “
Continue reading

Wow, I actually manage all this

My boss is trying to justify more resources so I made a list of all the stuff I am responsible for. 74 production servers with 8 major OS’s and 6 minor versions within the major versions 23 test servers 15 storage devices with 5 different OS’s 52 services How many are you responsible for?

Cool use of xargs

As part of our mail server testing we moved 10 people over to the new mail server and I used imapsync to get mail from the production mail server to the test mail server. I need to run this every 5 minutes and can run no more than 5 processes at a time. xargs allows…

Continue reading