Older blog entries for jnewbigin (starting at number 3)

I am finally back on the air. Some quick thinking network admins though they would firewall the staff subnet to prevent incoming connections. They neglected the fact that there were still a few servers on that subnet. Of course I did not notice there was a problem until someone phoned me and asked why their mail was not getting through. Anyway, I am now set up on the server subnet and should be live again.

I have spent the last few days playing with RedHat Linux 7.3. It comes with a recent kernel which accepts my patches without any modifications. All my RPMs seem to work too which is good.

Now all I have to do it sort out the rest of my problems with the bank...

I had a late night last night. I built an RPM for my smbpwman code but after I have published it I realiased that I still had hard coded server names and port numbers. I quickly invented a config file and implemented a simple config reader which should keep people happy at this stage. I'll polish it later.

After finishing smbpwman I figured I should get the smbmount RPM going. Despite all my looking I could not find any docs on "rpm -ta" but in the end I got it to do what I wanted. My samba patches seemed to work and after a few small build issues I had a working RPM. (Lucky I had mercury to do the builds for me. mercury can do a kernel diff in < 1 sec :).

Now that the client side setup is complete, I just have to wait and see if my samba patch gets into 2.2.4 so people can start using the unix extensions.

Today I was tasked with installing a web log analysis for a client so I did a test install on uranus. AWstats does a pretty good job. I was quite impresses with my stats too, even more so when I realised it was only 3 days worth not 30:).

After spending a few hours searching around on some old backups I found the source to my php module which does smb authentication.

I cleaned it up and built it into a RH72 compatible rpm. Now all the pesky students can log in and check their entries in the apache error log and fix their cgi assignments.

While I was at it, I set up a local php mirror so I can have instant access to the pretty PHP manual. I guess I'll let the students look at it too :)

I also got a tip off about the symlink problem in smbfs. I am off to check that out now

I finally got Windows 2000 running under VMWare with the kernel debugger connected. It turns out that the MS debugging tools installer can not do an upgrade and I had to uninstall the old version first.

Now that it is working I can make some progress on the ext2 filesystem. If I can get reparse points working then you will be able to mount your linux filesystems in a tree and not have to worry about drive letters :)