Physicists

"Phycicists are fun to be around. I was watching TV with one, and a commercial came on for OxyClean. The announcer's voice comes in, strong and deep, and says, What's the most powerful force in the universe? The guy I'm with starts pumping his fist and chanting, Strong nuclear force! Strong nuclear force! The announcer comes back and says, That's right, oxygen! Poor bastard looked like someone just shat in his ear."

(Conversation with a friend just now.)

Two things that didn't work:

• Trying to keep my LDAP nice and clean by having an alias for a posixAccount in another ou.

Explanation: there's ou=Smith and ou=Jones, both of which are under ou=People,dc=example,dc=org. Smith wants to offer Jones the use of a few of his machines, which means setting up accounts for Jones and a few of his folks (cn=Alice, cn=Bob, and cn=Charlie). Obviously, these should be in ou=Jones, right? But if Smith's machines, through the wonders of pam_ldap, are set to check ou=Smith, how do Jones' folks log in?

(Digression: actually, Smith's machines right now check under ou=People — not ou=Smith,ou=People. Smith is the first one to use LDAP, so I stuck with that. I was going to change that at some point anyway, and I thought this might be a good chance to do just that.)

I thought I could try adding an alias, under ou=Smith, that'd point to cn=Alice,ou=Jones. And if I told LDAP that it was a posixAccount as well, then I could look at the account details with id and getent. But the logs showed that it just didn't work:

pam_ldap: error trying to bind as user "uid=Alice,ou=Jones,ou=People,dc=example,dc=org" (Inappropriate authentication)

Couldn't track down the error quickly, so went to plan B: stick with the current setup (machines checking ou=People) and put 'em under ou=Jones. I can always add host restrictions later on.

• Rebooting an IBM eseries 336m server remotely.

Explanation: Smith had a bunch of these machines at another location before getting server room space at UBC (and new servers). My access to them previously was via SSH only — there was no console access at all (sigh). Now they're at UBC, and one of 'em's gonna be my monitoring machine/second LDAP server ("The new server room: now with redundancy!") But while it was simple to turn on console redirection and choose PXE booting from the comfort of my office, I ended up borking the kickstart process and having to come back here anyway to set up the install. There's the BMC, which apparently I can access via the serial console if I so choose, but I'm still trying to figure out what that'll get me — ie, I can't find a manual in 11 seconds, so I'm putting that off for now.

Oh, and my new (work) laptop is in. Yay! It's a Dell D630, and aside from it's obscene footprint compared to my (ailing) C400, it's great. Ubuntu (Hardy for compatibility with the desktops here) is on so far, and CentOS (server work) and OpenBSD (instant firewall) aren't far behind.