If you’re using RHEL you probably work in an environment where you don’t have root and the sysadmin will not just let you install random stuff you compiled, assuming gcc is installed at all. Even if you do have an area to install something from source, you’re now stuck with maintaining it. Enter EPEL, a community effort to take Fedora packages and make them available for RHEL 4 and 5. The list of packages is quite impressive, including painful things like php-mssql (for connecting PHP to Microsoft SQLServer).

Apart from providing packages, what it really provides is a sustainable way for your sysadmin to install and maintain packages that RedHat Network doesn’t provide. The basic setup is that your sysadmin installs a configuration RPM, which drops in the yum repository file and the GPG key used to verify the packages, and then just use yum like they normally would.

So, no more installing git from source.

Motivation can never be forced. People have to want to do a good job

Communications is built on trusting relationships

Last week one of our mission critical systems hit a bump in the road and was offline a better part of the day. We have a web application called System Status that is used by the help desk to track the availability of such systems. Having resolved all the issues we left the building only to realize that we needed to update the System Status application to notify the help desk and end-users that the system was back online.

Three of us immediately whipped out our iPhones to access the site and change the status flag. At that moment it hit me, why on earth isn’t this optimized for mobile devices? Having found a practical place to experiment with the iUI framework, I set about creating a parallel mobile interface for System Status. This interface, which uses the iPhone interface metaphors, will allow help desk support staff to check and update the status of our systems while out in the field or away on business.

Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of how the interface would look on an iPhone.

CAS is awesome.

So, there it is.

I will be trying to post as much as I can here and there will undoubtedly be some commentary on twitter.

is only avaliable [sic] with the XS version at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/IO/Socket/SSL.pm, line 30

I say seemingly because you know you didn’t change anything about IO::Socket::SSL. A few Google searches will at least fill in the blank before the is and tell you that LDAPS is unhappy.

If you are running RHEL 4, you probably had to install IO::Socket::SSL from CPAN. RedHat updated Perl 5.8.5 and some modules that required the XS (interface to use compiled C libraries in modules) version of Scalar::List::Utils. I’m not sure exactly what broke, but the easiest fix is to update IO::Socket::SSL from CPAN and it will update Scalar::List::Utils and all will be well.

Enjoy.

University Home Page

• 2007/08 – 9,289,385 visits as defined by Google Analytics

Yearly Unique Portal Logins (based on daily logs)

• 2005/6 – 1,905,225
• 2006/7 – 2,215,433
• 2007/8 – 2,415,444

Yearly Total Portal Logins (based on daily logs)

• 2005/6 – 3,377,752
• 2006/7 – 4,089,277
• 2007/8 – 4,359,887

Random

These numbers are based on whatever date range we happen to have numbers for.

• We have 23 Spaces and 372 users in Confluence, our enterprise wiki.
• 1,492 JIRA issues were created in the 2007/8 fiscal year.
• 32,915 visits on January 29th, 2008 was our high water mark for the Portal
• Portal browser stats (9/21/2007 – 6/30/2008) IE 60.47%, Firefox 29.53%, Safari 9.6%
• Home page browser stats 2007/8 fiscal year – IE 76.18%, Firefox 23.47%, Safari 8.7%

Curious about anything else?