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

You know, sometimes the right thing gets the right name…

Microsoft recently released their new search site/engin/whatever called “bing.”

I’ve seen it pop up on several sites, references to it in google ads in gmail, etc. The next thing that showed up in my inbox was a commentary on this. I thought I’d share.

You really have to appreciate the irony though. Pay attention to the URL below.

http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_561501581/bing.html

bing  
[bing](http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/Pronounce.aspx?search=bing)  
*plural* bings  

noun

Definition:

Scotland: **heap**  
a heap or pile of something, especially a slag heap 

Early 16th century. Old Norse *bingr*  
"heap, bolster"  

I decided to do a much delayed upgrade to the website yesterday. It involved:

• Putting the site into maintanance mode
• Backing up the current site
• Backing up the database
• Disabling all the installed modules
• Removing any non-default content in the webserver directory
• Extracting the latest minor revision of the software and testing that
• Extracting the next major version at the latest minor revision and doing the same (if this had been multiple major revisions, this process would repeat until up to the latest major/minor)
• Copying back the couple of directories that had old settings
• Running a database upgrade script (as the database changes every so often)
• Looking for current versions of all the installed modules and installing them again
• Firing it up and hoping nothing changed

Well, things went great until I discovered that the calendar module doesn’t exist in the current major revision (only 12 minor revisions have come out since it was released and the next major is in beta).

Meeting this Thursday at Pythian.

Bruce got interested in the qmail mail system as a result of mentioning the rocks project and has hit a snag during install. Assuming there is no other topic, we can go over the installation og Qmail as per the rocks project documentation during the meeting.

There was no commentary on the previous talk, so I’m going to ignore doing a practical install of djbDNS in favor of the qmail install, possibly more attractive to attendees.

POsted by Bruce:

I’m working on trying to get the qmailrocks project going on a vmware instance of Ubuntu 9.04.

I’ve come across a road block. When I get the part where the command to enter is:

./config-fast your\_fqdn\_hostname**

I entered:

./config-fast post.cyberserfdom.com

This came back with a response of:

-bash: ./config-fast: No such file or directory

I tried:

sh config-fast.sh post.cyberserfdom.com

This came back with a response of:

Your fully qualified host name is post.cyberserfdom.com

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/me

Config-fast.sh: 5: cannot create QMAIL/control/me directory nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/me' no such file or directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/defaultdomain

Config-fast.sh: 13: cannot create QMAIL/control/ defaultdomain directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ defaultdomain' no such file or
directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/plusdomain

Config-fast.sh: 20: cannot create QMAIL/control/ plusdomain directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ plusdomain' no such file or
directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/locals

Config-fast.sh: 23: cannot create QMAIL/control/ locals directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ locals' no such file or directory

Putting post.cyberserfdom.com into control/rcpthosts

Config-fast.sh: 27: cannot create QMAIL/control/ rcpthosts directory
nonexistent

Chmod: cannot access 'Qmail/control/ rcpthosts' no such file or
directory

Now qmail will refuse to accept smtp messages except to post.cyberserfdom.com