I understand that I have some new readers. Well, welcome to my little corner of the internet where I rant and rave over various items.
You will no doubt gain some added perspective of just what makes Jeff tick from the few, but pointed entries that I make to my blog.
Most of the more grouchy entries can be traced to caffeine withdrawl headaches. I am a confessed caffeine addict. I have no intention of changing this aspect of my daily life. Beware that if you happen to see me any time before 10AM, I probably haven't had my first caffeine of the day and I'm likely to be less than charming.
So, one might ask, when are you charming, Jeff? Well, that depends on a lot of things. I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say that it may happen periodically.
This server upgrade that I have been picking up the pieces from for the past two weeks has been quite an experience. The most annoying was milter-date discarding the digest messages because the stupid listserv software neglected to supply a date field in the email messages.
I wound up having to delve into the Mailman code itself and fix the problem so that I could still use milter-date. Mailman is written primarily in a language called "Python" that I've not programmed in before. It was nicely very straight forward what I needed to fix and it took me about a half an hour to go through two coding, building, and testing iterations. I was quite pleased with myself that I still could hack code.
I don't do much programming aside from shell scripts any more. Most of my time is spent dreaming up ways to keep the systems at work running for as long as possible between times when I actually have to touch them.
Laziness makes for good system administrators. They only want to have to fix something once and be done with it. Having to do something more than once is painful.
The laundry list of items that required me to do some migration work after the Red Hat 7.1 to Fedora Core 2 upgrade is pretty darned long. I'll try to list them here from memory:
- The IMAP server changed from Washington IMAP to Cyrus_IMAPD.
- The web server changed from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2
- Red Hat's build of sendmail still sucks
- Mailman went from version 1.0.13 (I think) to version 2.1.5
- Pine went from being a provide Red Hat RPM to a third party RPM
- Washington FTPD was replace by VSFTPD
By far, the IMAPD, sendmail, and Mailman were the items that took the most of my time.
One last word of wisdom: Don't falsly accuse someone of something unless you're willing to accept the consequences of them turning around and actually doing it to you.