Just a quick post to say Claire now has her own site and blog. She’s mainly going to be using it for baby related news and means people can get gossip direct rather than second hand from me 
May 13, 2007
Claires’ Site
April 23, 2007
Wardriving again
Partly prompted by getting a shiny new TomTom bluetooth GPS recently, I thought I’d fire up Wififofum on the way home to see what it found. It’s been about a year since I last did this and plotted the data and it was fairly interesting to see the difference. There are a *lot* more access points out there today, and more now have WEP turned on. Shipping them secure by default must be helping Of course the ones with WEP turned off may be using some other security, but if the SSID is default I’d guess not
Last time I did this I plotted the results using google maps. My code seemed to have broken over the last year so I decided to try the Microsoft Live mapping api. I was pleasently suprised to find it much easier to use than the Google one, and it seems to render the maps quicker as well I’ve also done things properly this time and uploaded the data into a database and made it easier to import data. The prod-development AP with no WEP outside of the Hornby factory might be interesting
The map is here for the interested.
April 17, 2007
Selling up
We’ve recently started the process of selling our house. Even though we’re not likely to move till the end of the year we figure that we’re going to be so busy once the baby arrives we may as well get started beforehand when we have a little more time.
We started by getting an agent round at the weekend to look the house over and do a valuation. He seemed pretty switched on and keen about selling the house so we decided to use his agency (which will remain nameless at the moment ) We agreed that the house would start being marketed in a couple of weeks as we need to do some bits to it, tidy it and sort the garden out.
Claire was therefore a little surprised to get a barrage of phone calls this morning from the estate agents. Firstly one wanted to visit the house to have a look round and gave a whole 10 minutes notice. She spent the time looking down her nose at the place (well, we did warn them…) before pretending (badly) that she liked it. I’m sure after a 10 minute visit she’ll be able to sell the house better…
Later on she then got a call off another agent who had a builder who was desperate to see the house. We agreed that he could show he round, even though we’re still a little annoyed that they’ve started flogging the place already. The estate agent turned up first, and my God, was he ever the stereotype. Sunglasses (even though it was going dark) and annoying personality. Again he obviously hated the house (I expect he’s more a designer flat type of guy) but did his best to pretend to be positive. The actual viewing went fine (though the builder had a rather nice MG so he’s obviously not planning to live round here ) and he didn’t seem to think much of the agent either. I suspect we won’t get any offer as the agents are selling the place as 3 bedroom (when it’s blatantly 2, unless you fancy sleeping in the cellar) for some reason and so it makes the house appear bigger than it is and is probably attracting the wrong type of interest.
Oh well, hopefully they will shape up a little more as they go on.
February 10, 2007
Wedding Anniversary
Today is our first wedding anniversary It’s scary how quickly the year has gone and difficult to believe that a year ago we were in Vegas. I’ve dug out our wedding video and put it somewhere we can find it so we can cringe at it in later years
We’re off out this evening to Cafe de China with our families to celebrate this and our birthdays (slightly belatedly ) which should be good fun and a good excuse to have some excellent food
February 1, 2007
Syncing XDA Exec on Vista
I installed Vista on my work PC recently and was annoyed to find that my PDA didn’t want to sync. It seems that activesync has been killed off in Vista and replaced with Windows Mobile Device Center. This would be fine, but the version that ships with Vista seems to do bugger all and would only let me sync media files. Which is useless as I hate Windows Media Player.
Anyway, after more googling today it seems you need an update from Microsoft (which they’ve only just released) to actually get it working. I installed that today and I’m syncing properly again!
January 27, 2007
Idiot drivers
We were less than impressed today when we left the house to do some shopping and found that some idiot had crashed in the back of our car. The boot is totally stoved in and the bumper hanging off so we didn’t fancy risking driving it. Whoever did it didn’t bother leaving a note or anything, even though judging by the damage to our car theirs must be in a real state. Makes you wonder whether it was one of the 12,000 uninsured drivers that leave the scene of accident without leaving details.
Tesco insurance, who we only just switched to, seemed very efficient in sorting out a courtesy car and repair of our car, though we have to wait till Monday for anything to happen. All in all it’ll only cost us £50, which is our excess, but it’s still a pain in the arse we could do without. We suspect it was one of the pillocks that do 60 down our road (which is a 30), couldn’t stop and slid into our car.
It’s only when you don’t have a car that you begin to sympathise with the people complaining about town centre shops shutting. Luckily we have a somerfield within 10 minutes walk, but if that wasn’t there all the big supermarkets and shops are a couple of miles away outside of town.
Hopefully we’ll get a sensible courtesy car on Monday and not some stupid tiny thing where I can push all the pedals with one foot Have to wait and see I guess.
Sympa
I’ve recently been playing with Sympa at work as it’s been decided the project needs to move on even though James is sunning himself in New Zealand
Sympa is a mailing list system, in the same vein as Majordomo (which we currently use) and Mailman. A big advantage of Sympa over the others is the close integration with LDAP. Along with being able to auth against it (which is great as it means the users don’t need another username and password) it can create mailing lists based on LDAP searches. This means we could easily create a mailing list for just us Carters It also allows you to manually add people to these dynamic lists as well which is useful.
Creating the lists in this way means you get the benefits of all the access controls that Sympa provides, which is much more flexible than what is available with a generic LDAP dynamic list. They are also dead easy to setup as we had a test list working in a couple of minutes.
All in all it looks like Sympa will be a huge improvement over our current system, I can see the users particulary liking the web interface, no more clunky email commands (unless you really want to use them )
January 26, 2007
Start of year recap
Well, I’ve finally got time to go over the things I’ve been working on since the start of the year. I’m going to try and make more of an effort to do these entries as it’s useful to jog my memory about exactly what I’ve been up to The days and weeks tend to be so hectic that I usually forget what I’ve done.
The first week and a bit of this year were very busy. I was involved in two major tasks that we wanted to get done before the bulk of the users came back, these were migration to a new printing accounting system and the move of files to a new filestore.
The printer accounting move was the first thing that needed doing. We’ve been using a good home grown system (written by a member of the Computer Science department) for many years and it was starting to get a little long in the tooth compared to some of the more modern products on the market. Features that we especially wanted were support for many different printer types, a web interface and easier management functions. After a thourough review process we finally settled on Papercut.
A lot of work was done before the start of term by a quite a lot of technical and user services to try and make the transition as seamless as possible. In the end it went pretty well with the actual import of users only taking a couple of hours compared to the days we thought it might do. We’ve had some interesting problems with some of the Unix queues scattered round the place and found quite a few printers we didn’t think existed Most problems have now been ironed out and the few issues we reported back to papercut are being worked
on.
Moving people from the old filestores of Croft and Compton (old P3 Xeon 500Mhz machines) to our new clustered and quotered system which has storage on the SAN went smoothly. The job wasn’t particularly technical but involved a fair amount of work as I needed to backup all the old data as the end of the day when it wasn’t in use and then restore it before 10am the next morning. Had to do some of the work from home which my other half wasn’t that impressed about
We’re now at the state where Compton has been switched off (it’ll make a good coffee table for someone) and Croft is just waiting on us moving the last tricky department. When they go it’ll free up a lot of space in the machine room which we can populate more efficiently.
The new clustered solution offers much more space than the old servers had (and can be grown on demand) and is much more resilient as the filestore is on a pair of clustered 1850s. This means the chances of an interruption to service are reduced and we can even maintain service whilst patching the machines. From a management point of view having quotas makes our lives much easier as rogue users can no longer fill up entire disk partitions any more!
Once these projects were out of the way I’ve spent my time logging more queries with Sun about Kentmail issues. I’ve mainly been concentrating on Outlook Connector issues and think I’ve finally got to the bottom of why users have been having odd problems writing to shared diaries. The long and short of it is that Connector seems to incorrectly order the ACEs meaning that a deny is applied before the allow in same cases, which is broken. I’ve had some fun convincing Sun of this and I suspect I may now more about how Calendar server works than some of their staff
I’ve also been doing my share of the large amount of Remedy queries we get after a vacation and I’ve been catching up on all the little jobs I’ve been putting off whilst working on the projects. These have included upgrading our monitoring software (Nagios) to the latest version and sorting out the queries that have been emailed to me directly. Sigh.
I’ve even tidied my desk and drawers and found the notes I made when I joined the University as a Helpdesk Operator 6 years ago. Sadly most of the notes are now irrelevant as most of the stuff they refer to has been retired. Oh well
January 2, 2007
Second baby scan
We had our second baby scan today and everything is fine which is obviously good news We’ve another scan in a few weeks as they couldn’t get good enough imaging of the babies heart to check the chambers etc. and though they don’t think there is a problem they want to be sure. I’ve put up our scan images which you may or may not be able to make out
The first set is here and the second here. The pictures probably need a little explanation as it isn’t obvious what’s going on
The first picture is a side on view, babies head to the right and arm (or possibly leg??) up in front. Second is a top down view of the skull and the third is a view of the spine. Both of the second set pictures are from the side, babies head to the right.
November 9, 2006
Postmaster emails and pc status
I spent a fair amount of time sorting out how postmaster email is routed after we received a couple of reports that anyone trying to send email out to postmaster at other domains had their email snaffled and sent to our postmaster account
A look at the Exim config showed a rather confused routing for postmaster that involved rewrites and redirects to another account, back to postmaster and then finally back to the other account again for delivery. I removed all this gumph and replaced it with a single alias to route postmaster correctly. I also managed to cut our oldest mailhub, mercury, out of the loop meaning it’s days are numbered . As usual the actual change took very little time (once I’d figured what out what on earth it was doing) but testing to make sure I hand’t knackered the config took quite a while. It’s in service now and seems to be working, which is good.
A side effect of this is that spamchecking for the Postmaster account now works, a feature requested by the people that look after it. We’re slightly unsure whether this is wise given that postmaster is a likely recipient of Freedom of Information requests. However, they claim the spam folder is checked carefully daily (though you wonder if there is a point spam checking for the account in this case…).
As a quick project I was also asked if I could find a way of checking whether certain windows computers were turned on and run this at regular intervals (this is for lecture theatre pcs). Nice and easy if you have the IP/hostname but a bit more fiddly if you only have the NETBIOS name (yuck). A bit of searching found nbtscan, which while it doesn’t do quite we I wanted does do netbios lookups incredibly quickly and is likely to be a useful tool. In the end I used nmblookup to query the WINS server to look for registrations for the computers which seems to work. If I can get IPs for all the computers I can use nbtscan which might be a bit quicker but it’s difficult to find the IPs out as the hostnames have no correlation to the netbios name. Hohum
