I’ve found enough information on converting from Drupal to Wordpress to make it worth the effort. Once done, the directory structure and the setup seem to be much more intuitive that the Drupal interface. Who knows? Maybe I’m just lazy.

Seriously though, the site has gone through 3 revisions over the years and a couple of mailing lists. Interestingly enough, I still have all of the data, even from the first days (written in MS Front Page) and a yahoo group for the mailing list. We then went to a package called Geeklog which sufficied for a while and no mailing list. Geeklog eventually got hacked and filled with more comment spam than I ever wanted to play with again. That inspired going to Drupal and after a comment by an unnamed person, adding mailman, which has done well, but as I commented in a prior post, failed utterly on the upgrade to the newer version. It may be incompatible plugins, who knows. The bottom line if the upgrade blew technicolour chunks. I backed out and continued on the old system.

As most of you know by now, we are pushing the July meeting out a week so it will not conflict with Blues Fest.

July’s Topics:

• Kelly will be doing one on VMware and NetApp storage
• Scott will be showing an “ignite talk”
• There may be a third presentation time permitting

19:00 at Pythian

It seems I’m a bit verbose this week.

First, my ISP is still having problems letting me send email from my servers. I am of the opinion that rebooting a cisco router multiple times a day in the vain hope that I will get the port unstuck is a bit much to expect. So far, no response to my question as to how much longer I will have to put up with this. Stay tuned for another exciting episode of “Help Desk Opera.”

At least that is what happened in my previous post, which is why it only showed up today. Of course, even if I had hit Submit, you probably wouldn’t have gotten a notification…

ISP issues… My outbound email was blocked at least most of last week if not longer. I really have no idea how long, but my mail server does show successes up to at least June 17, so it had to be working until then. It appears that the NCF (read as techsavvy) is blocking outbound SMTP. This is supposed to only affect dynamic IP address customers, but it apparently got applied across the board. An email with appropriate information showing the blocked port got me the full response rather than a “What are you talking about?” response.

Every now and then you have to do one of those fun tasks like change the passwords on everything at a site or data center or whatever. Bloody frustrating is what it is when you have to do this for a couple of hundred unix boxes AND you have to use different passwords depending on what the box is classified as.

Back in the day (early 1990’s), Don Libes had put together a tcl tool kit called expect, which could automate all manner of things. I have used it over the years and always liked it. Included in the kit are sample scripts, one of which is called passmass