Shibboleth (WTF is that?)
Posted on Wednesday, 28th February, 2007 in Life
OK, I’m sitting now again in train (hrm, I get the feeling I’ve done that already in the last few days - oh wait, I was doing that just on Monday) this time to Berlin.
My boss ordered me to attend a workshop covering the implementation of Shibboleth (for those of you, who can’t associate anything with that term - it’s an implementation for single sign-on, also covering distributed authorization and authentication) somewhere in Berlin Spandau (Evangelisches Johannesstift Berlin).
Yesterday was quite amazing workwise, we lifted the 75kg Blade Chassis into the rack (*yuck* there was a time I was completely against Dell stuff, but recently that has changed), plugged all four C22 plugs into the rack’s PDU’s and into the chassis, patched the management interface (which is *waaay* to slow for a dedicated management daughter board) and for the first time started the chassis. *ugh* That scared me .. that wasn’t noise like a xSeries or any other rack-based server we have around, more like a starting airplane. You can literally stand in behind of the chassis, and get your hairs dried (if you need to). So I looked at the blades together with my co-worker and we figured, that they don’t have any coolers anymore, they are just using the cooling the chassis provides.
Another surprise awaited us, when we thought, we could use the integrated switch to provide network for both integrated network cards (Broadcome NetExtreme II). *sigh* You need two seperate switches to serve two network cards, even if you only have two blades in the chassis (which provides space for 10 blades). *sigh* That really sucks, but its the same with the FC stuff …
So, we are waiting yet again for Dell to make us an offer, and on top of that, the sales representative doesn’t have the slightest idea if the FC passthrough module includes SFP’s or not … *yuck*
I must say, I’m impressed by the Dell hardware, but I’m really disappointed by their sales representative.
Plaything
Posted on Thursday, 3rd August, 2006 in Life
Ok, today I received another WRT54GL (yah, too much money 
) and updated it to dd-wrt v23-SP1 instantly and is now (once again) powering my wireless network.
Yay! and thanks to Cisco/Linksys for that fine piece of hardware and to NewMedia-NET GmbH for providing such a great image for this hardware 
Ah, nearly forgot that: remember, never put the same IP twice in the static DHCP lease table, or dnsmasq is refusing to start (thus no DHCP/DNS)!
Summer - finally
Posted on Wednesday, 12th July, 2006 in Life
Well it’s mid of July and the weather seems to be my friend. 25°C ain’t that bad. I really liked the weather last week (although everyone at work was bitching about it being tooo warm :P) and would like to keep it (for the rest of the year of course!).
Hrm, for everyone who loved the music within Kill Bill - Volume 1: Tomoyasu Hotei really rocks (playing Battle without Honor or Humanity).
Work is finally getting interesting. The x366 have been delivered, as well as the new Netbay 42U rack and of course the optional Cisco Catalyst 3650. Hopefully my co-worker will let me work on those babies in a short time (I would really like to :))
And now to my Gentoo related work:
I had an interesting conversation with Hendrik yesterday about some of his packages, and I’m taking over some of them …
I bumped sys-cluster/vzctl, hopefully all bugs related to the upstream changes (well I missed a config var in the init-script #138469) are now fixed. Oh yeah, they finally decided to switch to a sane versioning scheme. Thanks Kir and Igor!
Linux VServer stuff is also approaching its final release (even if Herbert is always saying When its done. I’ll prepare the patch tarballs for 2.{0.2,1.1}_rc26 later.
Meh, I nearly forgot to say thank you. Thanks a lot Mr. Bush. They just showed how the local waste disposal company is blocking the road with dumpsters while being protected by ~20 policemen … And only to prevent anybody driving into the city with a car which could endanger Mr. President!