The Life of a Sysadmin

I'm testing Bacula 3; the new release has just come out, and I'm very much looking forward to rolling it out here.

One of the things I've been doing is trying to get TLS working, which I utterly failed at in my last job. I must've failed to see these pages, which a) point out that the otherwise-excellent Bacula manual is (ahem) sparing when it comes to TLS, and b) you need to put the cert files in places that strike me as unexpected.

Thus, in bacula-dir.conf you put the directives listing the director's cert/key in the client section — IOW, you say "and use this key/cert combo when connecting to client foo." Meanwhile, on client foo, you add the client's cert/key directives in the director section ("and use this key/cert when talking to the director"), along with things like the CA cert and required CNs.

Oh, and did you know that you can debug SSL handshakes with openssl? True story.

This has been one of those days where all I've done is stare at monitors too closely.

I know, I'm a sysadmin, what do I expect? But some days I get up, move around; I'm sedentary (and introverted) by nature but I try to talk to people, stare off into the distance, get away from my desk. Going to the server room is always a good break.

Not today, though. My carefully-chosen ATI video card (the Radeon 4550) is giving me headaches, metaphorical and real:

• the proprietary fglrx drivers work if you want a cloned display, but enabling Xinerama makes X segfault
• or, interestingly, the fglrx driver will show the desktop on one monitor, and an "uninitialized" (X checker pattern, chunky X cursor) screen on the other
• the radeonhd drivers work perfectly for VGA out, but the DVI out is flickery and "noisy"

Dual monitors is important. My own damn fault for not getting something old enough...