Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Yesterday saw me configuring a lot of static DHCP addresses (what an oxymoron) for unofficial servers on the Linuxcare network. A large amount of DNS rewriting was required as well, though reverse DNS is still broken.

Apart from that, outstanding printer issues were one of the chief thorns in my side, although most of these have now been resolved. There was some Samba weirdness caused by a Red Hat box having been converted to Debian, but that was soon fixed.

All in all, yesterday was a great day. It was extremely hectic and people were making a lot of demands of me, but I work well in that kind of atmosphere, so I felt really useful and did a lot of good work. People seemed really happy with the way Rob, Steph and I handled the IT side of the move, which is rewarding.

I’m glad most of the move is now behind us. We now have the professional look we deserve. A lot of things have happened here in recent months and this is a fresh start for all of us. I, for one, am feeling very optimistic about the future.

I spent the entire weekend working on Linuxcare’s move into the new office space. This involved humping around a lot of gear and spending a lot of time with a screwdriver in my hand.

The IP migration is complete and we have a couple of printers networked. DNS needs a major overhaul, but I’ve made enough changes that the situation is workable. DHCP has been reconfigured, and the printers are now named after people who made major contributions to printing technology, like Gutenberg and Caxton.

All in all, it went pretty well. People should be able to work when they arrive tomorrow morning, which is a pretty good state of affairs by anyone’s standards.

Went out to lunch with Richard Stallman, Art Tyde, Dave Siffry, Len Reed and Dave Mandala last Friday. That was a lot of fun. We had a very lively discussion about the community’s promotion of the short term economical benefits of free software over the long term moral issues.

Richard sat cross-legged on the ground outside the restaurant for a while with his laptop on his lap, looking like a high-tech beggar. I wished I’d had my digital camera handy for that.

It looks like I might be needed in Amsterdam in a few weeks. Apparently, things are taking off over there and they need someone to set up the infrastructure.

I went to see HR today to see about getting more permanent status out here in the US. It looks like they may be prepared to apply for the H-1 visa on my behalf. It’s just a shame that the cap has been reached for this year.

As I write this, I’m over in the Utah Street location, playing with Postfix as a possible replacement for qmail. It seems pretty good so far, but I still have a lot of testing to do.

I have to write a page or two for the Linuxcare University folks on configuring sendmail using M4 macros.

I’m putting together an RPM of bash 2.04 as well, but I seem to be experiencing some weirdness with the %description section of the spec file on rpm 3.04. It seems to be ignoring my text and pulling a description from some external source. Very odd.

I received a patch for signature today from Alexander Zimmerman, so I should find time to integrate that as well and announce a new version on Freshmeat. I also have an outstanding feature request list from Marcin Kasperski that I should really get around to implementing.

I’m listening to Nubreed by Anthony Pappa right now on my laptop with my headphones. This is such a great dance album, another excellent double CD from Cluboxed. I seem to be buying a lot of dance CDs lately, especially trance. Probably just a phase I’m going through. Life has been weird lately.

Rob Carter arrives in town tomorrow from Ottawa. He’s Linuxcare’s main network admin. We’ve got a lot of work to do at the end of the week, as everyone on Townsend Street and Utah Street is moving into a new location in the basement of Townsend. We have a major IP migration and rehousing task to cover, and I’m looking forward to working with Rob again.