Peter Woods

I decided to give myself a little upgrade on blog. It's a wee bit different than the previous version that I was running.We'll see how this goes. Troy gets to start with the new version.

I'm updating my Linux workstation in the background today.  It's going from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.0.4 beta.  It's going slowly right now because of the downloads.  I've only got to retrieve 1302 packages. My desktop is defintely not as trim as our RHEL servers.

Here's to something different.  Hopefully I sound a little more spontaneous in the future…

I've been working lately on rebuilding our Nagios installation on a RHE5 server. The new server is going to take advantage of Fruity to aid with the configuration. While not entirely different, there are some which caused me to slow my pace a bit.  The first was the introduction of yum rather than up2date to manage RPMs.  After a little bit of tinkering to find the yum commands that where equivalent to the up2date syntax that I was used to, I was back on my merry way. The hurdle that I'm working on is the SELinux environment. The SELinux policies are much more stringent than in RHEL4. I've never previously run into a situation where SELinux prevented root from deleting or modifying files. I could go the "off-fix-on" route, but I figured that I'd better take the time to get this mastered since RHEL5 systems are going to be a reality in our environment. The source files for the policies are not installed, but now tools exist to create modular policies, which is a nice addition. In addition, I'm taking the time to layer on all of the miscellaneous security tools that I built into our production RHEL4 web environment.

With the exception of my occasion Safari on x86 experiment, I use Firefox for most of my web needs.  Unfortunately, there are a couple of site that require IE.  There are currently two applications that I access on a regular basis that are bound to IE: Magic and Sharepoint.  I've found that IE Tab and IE View are good for  minimizing the disruption of switching browsers.  I was hoping that I would be able to get away with just using IE Tab; however, Magic does not like being confined to a tab in Firefox.

I just updated to Safari 3.0.3 so I'm testing to see if I can make a blog post.

Edit: Looks like one finally made it through. 

I periodically startup the Windows beta version of Safari to do some testing, and every once is a while I even check for a new version.  Unfortunately Apple does not include the version on their download page , and the file is simply called SafariSetup.exe.  Apple, please take a hint from the Firefox folks, and put the version on the page an in the filename. BTW, I still can't post to my Wordpress blog using the Safari.

Ok. So I'm getting adventurous and trying out Safari on XP.  I usually use FireFox so I'm used to an "alternative" browser.  It looks pretty nice so far.

I just download the evaluation version of Adobe Contribute CS3.  I was hoping that somewhere in the 198MB download that there would be working SFTP functionality.  Alas, no luck.  The CS3 version fails at the same point as version 4.  It's unable to verify my connection information.  

I've updated my Wordpress installation to 2.1.3, and I'm now looking for volunteers in the group.  Once everything it vetted, I'll roll this out to the production environment.