Saturday, January 07, 2006
Projects, Shell Scripts & Fast Food
The new year is upon us, and work is upon me! It has been a crazy busy year and we are only a week into it. It's been the good kind of crazy, but I'm pretty tired already. Things are rolling along, and I've pretty much wrapped up a couple of projects and about to get into a few new ones.
I had a meeting with a client this past week. It was basically a PR visit to go over all of the little changes made with Kolab + Horde in the last month. We set up SSL certificates for all domains, and we went through changes needed on the client applications. We did some testing on the Quota limits in Kolab, and what actually happens in Outlook, and Horde when your limit is breached. It was quite informative. I am always humoured by windows. I actually witnessed one of the most bizarre settings in my mind. On the laptop we were using, I unplugged the network cable from the wall. A few seconds later back in ... but no network. Travis fixed a wonky setting which basically tells windows "if the network is unplugged, then just shut down the card, but don't bring it back up when you have network again". It is beyond me why anyone would ever want that, but some do I guess.
Ray and myself were at Polaris last night to put the last features of the project into motion. We were to shut off the routing, and DHCP services from the windows 2003 server, and start them on the Atrium server. My routing and DHCP setup was all of about 15 minutes. (Thanks to guidedog, and ISC doing things right). We did spend a few hours getting things to work properly on the windows side. Granted the previous setup was just farked from the start. We found a few problems like having your domains at Netsol direct all other traffic (crap.domain.com, anything.domain.com) to an IP ... which happened to be the mail server. No wonder people were complaining about slow access. We finally got everything sorted out with the DHCP, and the DNS settings. Also set up internal Samba shares for access to the web servers. It's a nice warm fuzzy to be done with something.
Today I am heading back out to Gregg's to install a new Atrium server. I upgraded to Kubuntu (5.10). I had my own disc I burned ... not from Aaron Seigo (read here) hahaha. I upgraded the Kolab server to official release (I should really grab the latest 2.0.2 which was recently released). The Horde installation from current CVS seems to work with no problems. It's the latest and greatest. I'm ready to rock and roll on this one. It was a lot of prep work (of which I still have some final prepping to go through). Another project almost finished.
During my testing of upgrading an Atrium installation (with a Kolab installation + Horde). I ended up writing a suite of shell scripts that do some handy little things for you with the Kolab back end. I already had mass user import scripts, so I added those in as well. I wrote some scripts to do on line and offline LDAP backups, and reload the LDIF data back into a new server. I also wrote a script to import the IMAP data (providing a path to it on the local machine) so all of the users email is still there. I did some testing, and more testing, and debugging, and more testing. I finally got it to work from a fresh Kolab installation, bootstrap, dump the old Installation, tar up the data, copy to new server, and run the scripts. Everything installed and is working. From the admin interface with account manipulation to IMAP mail read through Horde. I was impressed.
The actual code for the scripts is not overly special. Basically an include to set out binaries and paths to use. Variables for LDAP binding and whatnot. I was quite proud of myself because for the first time in my life I actually used awk in a shell script. That's right I used awk. I was quite impressed with myself. I was showing them to Aaron and he had some ideas on how to use them withing the Front end for Atrium. So I started adding getopts functionality to the scripts so we can add command line args as needed. It's pretty sweet.
With all that has been going on lately, I have no time for friends, no time for fun, I barely even get to relax. I don't even have time to cook. You know you are busy when I look forward to getting Subway, and eating in front of my computer while I am writing emails (work related). My treat was fast food that I got to eat during work. I am looking forward to getting some McDonalds tonight and watching the late Hockey Night In Canada Game. *sigh* ... I'm not complaining ... I planned on focusing on work right now ... but a little break tonight would be nice. ¶ 9:17:00 AM
I had a meeting with a client this past week. It was basically a PR visit to go over all of the little changes made with Kolab + Horde in the last month. We set up SSL certificates for all domains, and we went through changes needed on the client applications. We did some testing on the Quota limits in Kolab, and what actually happens in Outlook, and Horde when your limit is breached. It was quite informative. I am always humoured by windows. I actually witnessed one of the most bizarre settings in my mind. On the laptop we were using, I unplugged the network cable from the wall. A few seconds later back in ... but no network. Travis fixed a wonky setting which basically tells windows "if the network is unplugged, then just shut down the card, but don't bring it back up when you have network again". It is beyond me why anyone would ever want that, but some do I guess.
Ray and myself were at Polaris last night to put the last features of the project into motion. We were to shut off the routing, and DHCP services from the windows 2003 server, and start them on the Atrium server. My routing and DHCP setup was all of about 15 minutes. (Thanks to guidedog, and ISC doing things right). We did spend a few hours getting things to work properly on the windows side. Granted the previous setup was just farked from the start. We found a few problems like having your domains at Netsol direct all other traffic (crap.domain.com, anything.domain.com) to an IP ... which happened to be the mail server. No wonder people were complaining about slow access. We finally got everything sorted out with the DHCP, and the DNS settings. Also set up internal Samba shares for access to the web servers. It's a nice warm fuzzy to be done with something.
Today I am heading back out to Gregg's to install a new Atrium server. I upgraded to Kubuntu (5.10). I had my own disc I burned ... not from Aaron Seigo (read here) hahaha. I upgraded the Kolab server to official release (I should really grab the latest 2.0.2 which was recently released). The Horde installation from current CVS seems to work with no problems. It's the latest and greatest. I'm ready to rock and roll on this one. It was a lot of prep work (of which I still have some final prepping to go through). Another project almost finished.
During my testing of upgrading an Atrium installation (with a Kolab installation + Horde). I ended up writing a suite of shell scripts that do some handy little things for you with the Kolab back end. I already had mass user import scripts, so I added those in as well. I wrote some scripts to do on line and offline LDAP backups, and reload the LDIF data back into a new server. I also wrote a script to import the IMAP data (providing a path to it on the local machine) so all of the users email is still there. I did some testing, and more testing, and debugging, and more testing. I finally got it to work from a fresh Kolab installation, bootstrap, dump the old Installation, tar up the data, copy to new server, and run the scripts. Everything installed and is working. From the admin interface with account manipulation to IMAP mail read through Horde. I was impressed.
The actual code for the scripts is not overly special. Basically an include to set out binaries and paths to use. Variables for LDAP binding and whatnot. I was quite proud of myself because for the first time in my life I actually used awk in a shell script. That's right I used awk. I was quite impressed with myself. I was showing them to Aaron and he had some ideas on how to use them withing the Front end for Atrium. So I started adding getopts functionality to the scripts so we can add command line args as needed. It's pretty sweet.
With all that has been going on lately, I have no time for friends, no time for fun, I barely even get to relax. I don't even have time to cook. You know you are busy when I look forward to getting Subway, and eating in front of my computer while I am writing emails (work related). My treat was fast food that I got to eat during work. I am looking forward to getting some McDonalds tonight and watching the late Hockey Night In Canada Game. *sigh* ... I'm not complaining ... I planned on focusing on work right now ... but a little break tonight would be nice. ¶ 9:17:00 AM
