My web wanderings

HOWTO: Configure Ubuntu for Active Directory Authentication - DeveloperNet

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So I have to say I my Treo is the one gadget I couldn’t live without. Together with Goodlink it is tremendously helpful in my chaotic work enviroment. So that being said I need to post about some things I need and or want.

1. Docking Station

http://mytreo.net/news/archives/000461.php
http://blogs.shareup.net/root/51/treo650-software.html

FreeMind - free mind mapping software

So google has added another notch in their belt towards their goal of information domination. Want to search for a book containing some bit of infomation you have been looking for? No problem just google for it. http://print.google.com/ Good work Google. You keep impressing me all the time.

Since my company was recently aquired we needed to sync Contacts between two organizations prior to connecting our Active Directories. In order to facilitate this we first assumed we could do it like in Exchange 5.5 via admin.exe. WRONG. After much hunting and some ADSI hacking we found this page. It was extremly helpful. Shortly I will post some modified scripts that Jason developed.

Ten Tips for Corporations to Protect Customer Information from Identity Theft

1. Unless there is a specific reason that personal information is being stored, get rid of it. If information needs to be there, set a timetable for its length of stay and when it can be disposed of.
2. Make sure that the server holding personal information is isolated to its own network with limited access. The network should be secured/protected by a strong firewall that protects from attacks at the network, protocol and most importantly the application layer.
3. The server that contains the personal information should NOT allow direct connectivity to any user on the public Internet.
4. The isolation of the database server should provide protection not only from the Internet but from other Internet facing servers as well as the internal network.
5. Under no circumstance should the database server be permitted to initiate connections to the Internet.
6. The controls afforded by the application layer defenses must include the ability to control not only what the database can query, but the explicit commands that can be run, as well as the number of responses per query.
7. Both the security mechanisms and the database server should be operated on kernel hardened operating systems to mitigate the risk of operating system bugs or vulnerabilities.
8. Strict controls of who can access the server should be in place, be enforced, and reviewed to validate the need for access rights.
9. A multi-defense is your best defense; take full advantage of both security mechanisms available within the database application and strong encryption as well as security mechanisms of the application level firewall.
10. All communication of personal data sent to/from the database across public and private networks should be permitted over encrypted channels (HTTPS / SSL SSH).

the 5-in-1 network admin’s cable
ethernet / crossover / modem / null modem / Cisco console

This is something I have wished I had for years.

Kudos to Mike Ossmann and at the same time checkout the pure sweetness that is Make Magazine. I really need a subscription.

So I am back to using Evolution as my primary Email app in Ubuntu Hoary. I still love thunderbird but, since I am trying to get contacts and calanders sync’d with my Treo 650 thunderbird is not the best solution. I found today a good article on filtering mail with Evolution.

By The Exchange Team

Many times I’ve been asked to give a guideline on how large a mailbox can be before performance degrades, or on the recommended size for a mailbox. Unfortunately, this question is like asking “How many cookies are enough?” There may be a lot of implied information, but the question itself is vague. For example, I personally think there are never enough cookies, while my brother won’t eat more than one. Nonetheless, I have been asked to forge ahead, declaring my assumptions, and stating my conclusions.

First, there are no inherent size limits on individual mailboxes. The main factors that limit mailbox size, practically speaking, are available disk space, backup and restore times, Service Level Agreements, and Outlook performance. By Outlook performance I’m referring to the latencies experienced by the end user. In this blog, I’ll just talk about the limitation due to Outlook performance.

It’s item count, not size, that matters

First, it’s not the size of the mailbox that impacts performance - it is the number of items in the folder or folders that are being accessed on the server. In particular, performance is largely influenced by the number of items in the most commonly used folders: Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder.

Having a large number of items in a folder will mean than operations in that folder will take longer. Operations that depend on the number of items in the folder include adding a new column to the view, sorting on a new column, finds and searches. Many Outlook plug-ins do sorts or searches as they are running, and these requests may overlap with other Outlook MAPI requests, resulting in a poor user experience.

If you are running in Cached-Mode, (the default mode for Outlook 2003), then client performance can be an issue. One thing you should do is keep your OST files (the local data cache) free of fragments. There is a nice little tool called CONTIG on sysinternals.com for this purpose (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/contig.shtml).

All user pain is subjective

Setting a limit depends somewhat on your users’ tolerance for pain. Are they comfortable with slow Outlook operations, or do they expect a snappy response? How much wait are your users willing to tolerate? The number of items in these key folders has a large impact on the delays for many common actions, and this is one factor that the user can control. Publishing guidelines for your users may help them control their own experience.

Not all users are created equal

In addition to the number of items in the key folders, there are other factors that impact the Outlook experience, such as the number of other MAPI applications or Outlook plug-ins running on the user’s machine. All MAPI requests contend for attention in mapi32.dll; if you have a lot of plug-ins making requests, Outlook will run slower. Furthermore, the complexity of the action will have an impact. For example, marking all items in a folder as read is going to take a lot longer than marking one item. Other actions that inherently may take a long time include getting free-busy information for a lot of users on a meeting request, or doing a search across multiple folders. If your users are frequently doing complex actions, have lots of plug-ins, or have high use of the contacts and calendar folder, you may want to recommend that they keep limit the number of items in their critical path folders.

Not all servers are created equal

If you’re running on really old hardware, you may experience poor performance at a lower number of items than if you’re running on the latest-and-greatest. This is a big area and I’m just not going to go into this any further here… Ok, I lied; I have to add one more thing: disk latencies. For optimal user experience, make sure disk latencies are small (eg, 20ms or less), even during peak server usage (see my earlier disk blogs).

Here’s an example to show how disk latency can add up. When getting a view, the requests for the data are done in individual, serialized requests from the disk, not bulk operations. So for example, if a plug-in is getting a view of 1000 items, then the Exchange store will probably make about 200 separate requests for data (assuming about 5 messages are retrieved per request). At 20 ms, that’s a guaranteed 4 second delay just from the disk subsystem alone! Imagine if your disk latency was 50ms or 100ms? To make matters worse, if you have multiple plug-ins making similar requests, you may find that your Outlook client is frequently blocked. Help yourself (and the other users) by keeping disk I/O latency low.

The Bottom Line:

I usually recommend no more than about 2500 - 5000 messages in any of the critical path folders. The critical path folders are the Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder. Ideally, keep the Inbox, Contacts and Calendar to 1000 or less. Other folders, particularly custom folders created by the user, can handle having larger numbers of items without having a broad impact on the user experience (20,000 items in my “Cookie Recipes” folder? No problem - except when I need to find that recipe from last Christmas!).

If getting word out to the users to reduce folder item counts is impractical, administrators have another option. Administrators can use the Mailbox Manager tool to control the size of critical mailbox folders. Unfortunately, Mailbox Manager does not evaluate the mailboxes based on message count within a folder— instead it processes messages by age and/or size of message. Regardless, if your organization allows the use of it, it can help prevent mail folders - and user-frustration - from getting out of control.

- Nicole Allen

I spent the last two days automating processes that co-workers had been doing on a manual basis for a LONG time. One thing that I needed was to rename a file with the current date. Bring in google and bam I found this.

ren test.txt test%date:~4,2%-%date:~7,2%-%date:~10%.txt

Now I have it handy in case I ever need it again. Credit goes to FishMonger on http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/14569.html

By Jono Bacon

03/03/2005

From the article

The Importance of the Message

Within the open source community, advocacy is as critical as contributing source code, patches, or documentation. Although advocacy is not a technical contribution, it is critically important to spread the message of open source to other people in a language that is cohesive to their context. It is easy to preach to the converted when advocating open source to people at Linux user groups and trade shows, but standing in front of a board of executives who care little about computers–let alone a facet of computers, such as open source–is quite a challenge.

Here is a review of a SQL encryption tool that I could use for work

By: Joshua Wood

My work involves administering Unix Web servers and a mix of office desktops, along with developing the applications we run on them. I use Mac OS X to do it because it is something like a superset of those other popular OS choices. While much of the software I deploy is free, both as beer, I’m willing to open my wallet for OS X.

From: NewsForge

Here is a plethora of information on VPN technology

This has been posted all over the internet but here I go anyway. Google has a new mapping service that is just sweet. It really shows you all the smart people they have working over there and that they are focused on working on technologies we can all use in our lives. Good job google and keep up the good work.

Google Maps

Testing the Gnome-Blog app. It this works it will be great. Now if Ubuntu will just upgrade the package in Universe.

Power Outage Knocks LiveJournal Blogs Offline (Ziff Davis)
(16 hrs, 16 mins ago)
A sudden power outage has knocked millions of Six Apart Ltd.’s LiveJournal blogs offline.
The power failure occurred on Friday evening at the Internap data center affected more than 100 servers that keep LiveJournal’s blogging network up and running.
“LiveJournal is currently completely inaccessible, and we’re waiting on Internap for an estimate when power will be restored. Once power is restored, the service will be brought back up slowly so that we can ensure data integrity,” Six Apart said in a notice. “We’ll [provide an] update with an estimate for when the service will be brought back up once we hear back from Internap.”

How cool is it that I am posting this wirelessly from my brand new Treo 650. Oh yeah baby. btw I can also manage my servers from it. No more laptop for me on road trips.

Thanks to lovely wife for putting up with my need of geeky toys.