Role sensitive content in Drupal

Let’s try this again. A subject for another blog, I’ve been asked to help a local small retailer join the eCommerce revolution. The owner has finally decided that he needs to be online or he faces obsolecense. I’m not a heavy web or software developer, so I was looking around for off-the-shelf (off-the-net?) open source…

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SysAdmin of the year – yeah, NA only

I really appreciate these contests, but sadly there are severe limitations. From the Rules page: All entry information is collected in the United States. The Contest is open only to residents of the U.S. and Canada excluding Quebec due to restrictive contest laws. Anyway, what kind of businessman do you expect to put their SysAdmin…

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Getting WIndows admins to come around to Samba

So we’ve had this extremely busy summer. Last summer our new Dean laid down the law and told every department in our college to start working together and come up with a unified IT environment by the start of Fall semester ’06. We spent about 8 months just getting everyone to agree on what authentication,…

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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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Post-Leopard OS X

Explore, not converse, is the best verb for describing an ideal mode of human-computer interaction. It is a simple change in perspective that makes an enormous difference in the way everything looks. Rheingold, Howard. “Cyberspace and Serious Business,” Virtual Reality. New York: Simon & Schuster–Summit, 1991. p.183. Last week, I was chatting with a lunch-mate…

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Sysadmin Bookshelf

There’s some interest in creating a sysadmin bookshelf, which I think is a great idea. We’ve basically got all the ‘categories’ we need, I think, in the Standards category taxonomy. It’s nice to reuse things for multiple purposes. It gives a sense of coherency to site organization and allows you to browse through things in…

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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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Wireless driver security flaws demonstrated

Brian Krebs’ Security Fix blog at The Washington Post, posted an article about wireless card security flaws. Though the article seems at first to focus on Apple OS X products, they were only used to demonstrate vulnerabilities found in multiple wireless drivers for a variety of operating systems. Later the article does discuss some Windows…

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NagiosGraph: tastes great, less filling

A few days ago, someone on irc.lopsa.org asked for something like [Cacti|http://www.cacti.net], but smaller, easier to manage, and that plugs into [Nagios|http://www.nagios.org]. Having just brought up such a system a few weeks ago, I was able to recommend [NagiosGraph|http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosgraph/]. In our situation, we make very little use of SNMP, so Cacti would have been of…

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