Productive Day

Today I finally managed to get RHEL5 boxes authenticating against Active Directory using secure LDAP. I had no problem getting RHEL4 boxes to do it, or RHEL5 boxes without TLS, but I figured out what the problem was with RHEL5. In my /etc/ldap.conf I had a line:

ssl yes

Which enabled Secure LDAP in RHEL4. In RHEL5 the line needs to be:

ssl start_tls

Incidentally, that line works fine in RHEL4, which means that I can continue using the same config files (and eventually package them up as an RPM or something for when we provision new nodes) across RHEL4 and RHEL5 systems.

Beyond that Chris managed to get two Itanium HPUX servers racked and their console cards configured. He had a nice introduction to Wireshark to get their MAC address, and then arp ping to configure the IP’s. Tomorrow I will work with him to get the VLANs set correctly on the switch uplinks, and then I will have to do something to jog my memory to disable Serviceguard on those two nodes.

September 22nd, 2008 in Uncategorized | tags: LDAP, Linux, Tech, Work | No Comments

Inaugural Monmouth County Concours d’Elegance

Saturday I took a ride up to Holmdel to see the first Concours d’Elegance (a car show full of meticulously restored pre-1960’s cars). The event was held at Hop Brook Farm, which is right next to my old company’s headquarters. After being away from there for nearly 8 years, it was nice to be back.

They expected (and got) a lot of attendees, so Vonage let them use their parking lots for visitor parking. Vonage’s headquarters are in the old Prudential building on Holmdel Road. It’s on a huge piece of property. Driving in I noticed that they had a softball field to the right, and walking across to get to the event I walked through their soccer field. I’ve worked in startups before, but none of them had so much as a foozball table, let alone a softball or soccer field. The HQ of Vonage seemed very slick from what I saw. I can only imagine what their infrastructure is like. From what I understand, it’s very Solaris heavy.

Anyway, the event was really nice. Highlights were an 1887 Benz Motor-Wagen, recognized as one of the first “cars.” There was also a 1955 Mercedes Gull-Wing, a $500k+ car which I never thought I’d see in person, and a beautiful jet black Buick Lesabre. My first car was a 1969 Buick Skylark, and there’s not quite anything like the classic car smell that some of these things pick up. It’s sort of like the smell that Jaguars or Porsche’s have — something very unique to them.

You can see all of the pics in my gallery, but here’s a quick taste: