A 75 year old woman from central Sweden has been thrust into the IT history books – with the world’s fastest internet connection. Sigbritt L
öthberg’s blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection means she can enjoy 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously or download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds.
I wonder if she rents a room?
read more | digg story
On June 12th the FBI received a court order to send spyware to a MySpace account in order to investigate a bomb-threat. They call it a Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier, or CIPAV. “The exact nature of these commands, processes, capabilities, and their configuration is classified as a law enforcement sensitive investigative technique, the disclosure of which would likely jeopardize other ongoing investigations and/or future use of the technique,” wrote FBI agent Norm Sanders in an 18 page affidavit filed in a federal court last month. As a result Josh Glazebrook of Timberline High School was sent to juvie for 90 days.
Is the FBI finally catching up to the times? Or have they employed such tactics before? In 2001 the FBI admitted they were working on a virus called Magic Lantern.
While I can see the benefits of using such tools, I have to wonder about the ethics involved. First of all there’s the invasion of privacy issue. Of course this is the same issues with wire-taps, or using cell-phones as remote listening devices. Now I do see the need for such things in certain circumstances, but spyware and viruses on my computer!?! I suppose I just have such an aversion to such things since I have to spend so much time cleaning this crap up. So federally funded viruses and spyware, is it a good thing or a bad thing? What do you think?
Speaking of Sama, Technical Preview 5 (TP5) for Samba 4 came out last month. And what’s so great about Samba 4? It’s a little thing called Active Directory. Until now, using Samba as a PDC only gave you NT4 functionality, but with Samba 4 comes promises of full AD integration. It will include it’s own LDAP server and it’s own Kerberos implementation.
I’ve been watching this project for some time. Working for an NPO (Non-Profit Organization) we don’t have much of an IT budget, so when it came time to buy a server, I put all the money I had into hardware, and had to use free software. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying free = bad. On the contrary, I frequently use OSS(Open Source Software). I have an OpenBSD router and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server running certain custom Apps and I wouldn’t run them on anything else. I use VMWare on Ubuntu and I wouldn’t dream of running it on Windows. But when it comes to a domain controller, Samba has been a bit lacking. I hate to admit it, but Microsoft did a good job on Active Directory, and I’ve begrudged the fact that I can’t use it for some time.
But that’s all changing soon. According to the “WHATSNEW” doc in TP5, an alpha version of Samba 4 should be released in the next few months! Then comes BETA, and then eventually a stable release of Samba 4 with full AD support. I can’t wait. Until then, I’ll get everything I can out of Samba with OpenLDAP, but that day is coming!
I’m making some virtual machines in VMWare to load on my servers. I’m upgrading all the hardware and moving everything to virtual machines. We’ve been having some trouble with our network as the result of a crash a few months ago. Our server crashed when I was performing an upgrade and I had a terrible time with some kernel modules I needed to support our RAID controller. The fact of the matter is I got stressed and felt pressured for time and decided to implement Samba w/ LDAP on OpenBSD. I’d been using Samba for some time, but hadn’t used LDAP. I also hadn’t used OpenBSD as a Samba server before. What I discovered is that Samba + LDAP isn’t fully implemented in OpenBSD.
Anyway, the point is I need to do it all over and do it right this time. So I’ve been planning, and testing and this is what I got.
First of all, there are some great examples for setting up Samba at samba’s own website. Just go to http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-Guide/. You can go there and learn all you need. Go through the examples and get your Samba/LDAP PDC all setup. Or you can cheat, like I did, with smbldap-installer. I thought I’d write an extensive HOWTO, but the truth is everything you need is at http://www.vcsvikings.org/docuwiki/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/FrontPage. You can get the files you need there, then follow the instructions in the wiki. In Ubuntu, all I had to do was download the script, untar it, then run it. It automagically downloaded all the files and dependencies I needed, asked me a few questions, and before I knew it I had a Samba/LDAP PDC installed and working. The same script is also used to configure a Samba/LDAP BDC. Could it be any easier?
Now I just need to setup all my users and we’re good to go.
I got most of the hardware I ordered and I started assembling everything. I re-assembled my SAN in a new case and added all the new hard drives yesterday. Then during the day this morning I started noticing a kind of burning smell. I couldn’t track down the source of the smell, so I walked around the office and found a couple of volunteers to come to my office and track down the source of the smell. Before I left my office to find them I was recompiling my kernel on the SAN to enable the drivers for my new SATA II PCI-X card. When I got back to my office with my volunteer bloodhounds, the SAN was off and the power supply was burning hot.
No worries! I already had a new power supply ordered because I wasn’t certain the old one would handle all the new hard drives. It arrives tomorrow. Let’s just hope it shut down before anything else burnt up.
Twice in the past few weeks someone has given me a bag full of cookies as a thank you for fixing their computer. In the world of IT there is often a mentality of us (IT) versus them (the users). Just read a little of the BOFH, an acronym I won’t spell out on here. The BOFH is a system administrator who believes that his network is perfect, it’s the (L)users who cause all the problems. As true as that may be at times, the truth is IT exists for the users. What I love about the people I’ve met in Church IT is that they all have a different mentality. It seems to be a common theme with all the Church IT people I’ve met, “We are here to serve!”
But it’s not just the Church IT people who are different. Our user-base is so much better. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to help a user with a problem and then wound up being prayed for or blessed in some way. These people I work with and serve appreciate everything I do for them, and they never stop telling me. Whenever I send out an email informing everyone of some new feature or upgrade, I get at least a couple of emails back telling me I’m appreciated and keep up the good work. Since I’ve started working here I have never had to deal with angry users. If I feel pressure to get something fixed, the pressure comes from my desire to get things working for these wonderful people, and not from irate users demanding to know why they can’t access their data. And then to top it all off, I get cookies. I can’t imagine a better job than Church IT.
This is a Video I put together after our first Geek Day of Service in 2005. After this weekend I thought I’d share it here:
So after the LAN Party Saturday morning, I went to Fairview Christian Church in Carthage where Jim Walton of http://www.churchtechmatters.com helped put together a PC Workshop, or what I’ve always called a Geek Day of Service. Of course I only had about an hour and a half of sleep, but it was fun. There were five geeks there I think. I’m pretty sure they don’t mind being called geeks since we all wore shirts that said “Geek” on the front. I believe three people brought in their computers to be worked on. One of these three brought in three computers of her own. Basically we cleaned up spyware all morning. I think the most interesting thing I came across was a CD-ROM drive that quite expectantly one day. Turns out it was unplugged. The interesting thing is the woman who owns the computer insists no one had a chance to get into it and unplug it.
Overall it went well I believe. I’m excited that I’ve gotten to work with other churches and do this. For those who haven’t been following along, we’ve been doing Geek Days of Service at CHCC for a couple of years now. If I remember correctly we’ve had six. At the biggest one we had about 20 volunteers and worked on close to 80 computers. You may also remember that I said we weren’t doing any for awhile while we try to figure out what direction Geeks-4-Jesus is heading. Based on recent events I believe I’m getting an idea of where G4J needs to be going.
The first change I’m trying to work on for G4J is getting involved with other churches. I’ve managed to do this myself, but I need to work at getting more of our volunteers involved with other churches as well. I also want to work on developing better relationships with the volunteers involved. This part has actually been going pretty well. We don’t have as many volunteers involved as we used to, but the few who do things together know each other better. Of course there’s still LOTS of room for improvement, but I think it’s going fairly well. There’s a group of us who get together on a weekly basis just to hang out. Then there’s the LAN parties. We’ve had BIG LAN parties before, but these were too busy and we didn’t get to hang out with anybody. I didn’t even know everybody’s name by the time they were over. This last LAN was totally different. I think it was more fun because everybody knew everybody, and we had some free time just to hang out. The garage was small enough we were all close together and could talk to each other, then we got to hang out at Wendy’s.
Anyway, I think it’s time we get some of the geeks together again, and plan out in more detail where G4J will go this year.
What can be geekier than a LAN party in your garage? Personally I can’t think of anything. That being said, here’s some pics from the LAN Party in my garage last night.
This is setting up before the LAN:
Here’s the 16-Port 10/100/1000Mbps Managed (Layer 3) Switch we use:
This is poorchoices. His computer kept having issues, so he ended up having to use one of my spares:
Here’s most of the geeks setup and ready to go. The one in the red shirt is Charmo. He’s also using one of my spares:
Here’s what our fancy cabling looks like when all eleven computers were setup.
This is the middle of the night before people started leaving:
So we started around 6:00PM and the last few guys left about 5:00AM this morning. Charmo didn’t bring a computer so I had to give him one of my extra’s. My kids wanted to play a while so I had to bring the two laptops out too. Later poorchoice’s computer died so he took one of the laptops after the kids go to bed.
I hosted a LAN party in my garage. I supplied all the cable, CAT5, power strips, extension cords. Out of a total of eleven computers that were used, four were mine. When poorchoices started having PC trouble I was able to come up with a couple Gig of DDR RAM for him to swap out with his RAM to troubleshoot. I also was able to provide a 16-port managed Gigabit switch and configure QOS to optimize for gaming. So how geeky am I?
OK, here’s a quick run down of the evening. We installed, then play Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. I didn’t keep track of the final score, but I do know that Eksousia won, and my son Joe got second in points. Then we went to Wendy’s and almost everyone ate one of these:
The Bacconator!! And not just a Bacconator, at least 6 of the 8 who went out to eat had a number 4, the Bacconator combo!
Then we went back to the garage, played some worms, had compatibility problems with Vista, played some Half-Life, and then played Warcraft some more.
That’s pretty much it. If you want to come to the next one let me know. It should be sometime mid-August I hope.
A while back I looked at a programming language designed for kids called Phrogram. I found a bug in it early on and decided to move on. I’m looking for some tools to begin teaching my 9 year old son (10 in September) to program. Last night I was contacted by one of the developers of Phrogram and he asked me what the bug was. So here’s the story:
I was going through some of the tutorials available for Phrogram, and creating a curriculum that I would use to teach my son. Of course the first program is a “Hello World!” program. Here’s what it looks like:
Program MyNewProgram
Method Main()
print(“Hello!”)
End Method
End Program
The result looks like this:
OK, that’s what I would expect. But I don’t want my son to just type out a program pre-defined for him, I want him to explore each command and see what options go with it and experiment to get different results. So I did some research and found a few switches to use with the “print” command. Specifically \n for newline and \r for carriage return. So I made the following program:
Program MyNewProgram
Method Main()
print(“Hello\nWorld!”)
End Method
End Program
And got the following results:
Then I tried:
Program MyNewProgram
Method Main()
print(“Hello!”)
print(“\nWorld!”)
End Method
End Program
And got the following results:
I should note I also tried putting \n at the end of the first “print” command. In that instance the newline was completely ignored. It would appear that the “print” command begins on the first line each time it is run, but begins in a new “column”. So I made the following program:
Program MyNewProgram
Method Main()
print(“a\nb\nc\nd\ne\nf\ng\nh\ni”)
print(“1\n2\n3\n4\n5\n6\n7\n8\n9″)
print(“z\ny\nx\nw\nv\nu\nt\ns\nr”)
End Method
End Program
And so I get:
When I first found this behavior I thought it was a bug, but I’m not so sure now. There’s also the “printline” command, and it works the way I expected “print” to act with the newline (\n) command. Each time the “printline” command is invoked it begins on a newline. So I’m guessing the behavior I witnessed is just the difference between “print” and “printline”. Now that I’ve explored it more thoroughly I think I like it that way. It at least gives me some good examples for my sons first couple of lessons.
So the conclusion is I’m giving Phrogram another shot. I’m working on a curriculum based on it and I’ll probably blog more about it later. One of the things that drew me to Phrogram in the first place is that it’s designed for kids, and you can make video games with it pretty easily. I think the kids will love that!