This morning was our one chance to really sleep in all week and we really appreciated it. It was almost noon by the time that I pulled myself out of bed. Considering that it was pushing three when I finally got off to sleep that is only nine hours of sleep and with Oreo and Liesl both getting us up during the night it really just comes out to a more or less normal night of sleep. It just seems dramatic when you say that you slept in until noon.
Dominica and I have nothing at all scheduled today so we are taking the day to just relax. We entrenched ourselves in the living room with Liesl and Oreo and did our best to do pretty much nothing all day.
I worked on the continuing struggle of getting Linux (Red Hat) to integrate with Active Directory running on Windows. That is always a big pain no matter how you attempt to do it. Today I am learning about installing LikeWise Open which is basically a large package of a bunch of standard Linux components all set up to work together to handle AD integration with ease (in the same way that Zimbra packages a bunch of products to make email work in the same way.)
LikeWise ended up being a total breeze to install but doesn’t completely meet my needs so I ended up installing it to give myself some time to consider the alternatives and to think of the limitations or workarounds that may apply. After a lot of research into methods using WinBind, Microsoft’s UNIX AD Extensions and more it does look as though the LikeWise approach is probably the way to go but I am still not one hundred percent sold. I wish that I could do some simple ID mapping to make the two really work well together. I am also experiencing some bizarre home directory behaviour that seems to go against the stated behaviour in the LikeWise documentation so I need to look into that more as well.
Most likely what is going to have to occur is a manual UNIX GID migration to match Windows. That will be a pain but I think that it will work fine and the home directory problem is something around which I can work without too much of a hassle. I really want to get all logins everywhere to authenticate to a single backend instead of having one system for email, one for desktops, one for UNIX, one for websites, etc. That is far too much to remember.
Dominica got the chance to do one of her Linux Administration classes today. That completed her seventh of eleven classes in this module that she is doing.
We watched a bit of Netflix OnDemand today. Mostly Murder She Wrote and “The Seeds of Death” episode of Doctor Who from like 1967. It is one of the old, awful black and white (shades of grey) episodes that was likely pulled from BetaMax because the BBC lost the original. It was a six part episode. All of those episodes are so cheesy but they are still fun. I can’t wait until we work up to the mid-seventies and the eighties. Those are the episodes that I really liked growing up.
Around eleven I got paged out. Not for something quick either. I had to hop right on to a conference call that lasted for quite a long time. Of course the day could not go by without me having to work. But we really need the overtime these days so I really cannot complain. It is quite the blessing to be able to book another couple of hours after Liesl had already gone to bed. I am not missing any baby bonding time and I still get paid.
When I started on the late conference call it was still clear outside. Only a few flakes of snow were beginning to drift down although Katie had reported from South Jersey that they were getting a blizzard already. By the time that I was wrapping things up long past midnight I took Oreo out for a late walk and discovered that there was an inch or two of snow already built up! The rumor is that we can expect to see as much as thirteen inches by morning. Everyone is already talking about working from home tomorrow.
One of the guys working with us on the phone conference was working from his car and actually had it catch fire and burn up while he was on the phone. He dropped off of the call suddenly and never got back to us. It turns out that he had left his BlackBerry in the car and it burned up with the car. He managed to call back from the ambulance while on oxygen to let us know what had happened. He was expecting to have to go to the ER to be checked out. It did not seem like a matter for any serious concern, but it did lend a bit of excitement to the late night conference call.
Well I get to book a few hours even if I did end up missing out on watching Johnny Be Good with Dominica. She ended up going to bed without me since I was stuck working so late. It was around one in the morning when I was finally able to head off to bed. Not too bad. We often don’t get to go to bed until after that.
Good luck dealing with the snow everyone. Tomorrow is going to be a fun day. All of the kids are definitely having snow days as are many of the adults!
Here is something interesting: as of last year I have now been blogging for a quarter of my life! That does not seem possible. One out of every four years is recorded in SGL. That does not include any of the “looking back” stuff that I do where I go back and fill in old details either. I have not had a chance to do very much of that but I hope to get to that more in the future. That is harder to do because I really need a list of dates of when things occurred to know when to write about things.