March 4, 2009: Liesl Finally Sees Her Doctor Again

The big news for today came late this evening – the Ralstons have managed to rent their home out which pretty much sets them up to be able to go to the Congo at any moment.  We don’t know the details yet on when they are going to travel to Africa but the only major barrier left has been removed.  In theory they could leave in as little as a month.

After working until after three thirty in the morning I slept in a bit today.  Oreo was very snugly and stayed in bed late with me.  I had to get up and work for a little over an hour, which was pretty busy as most of my morning’s work was condensed into a pretty short period of time.

Liesl was super-ultra sleepy girl today.  She slept all night solidly, had her morning snack around seven, and then slept again until we woke her up to put her into the car.  She was a very happy baby today with all of that sleep.

At eleven we took Liesl to her doctor’s appoint.  She has not had one in quite a while.  She did very well.  Her doctor said that she is looking really good and all of her stats are right where they are supposed to be.  She is up to twelve pounds and two ounces according to the official scale and is twenty-four and one half inches long.  She turns three months and one week old tomorrow.

We had some concerns about Liesl having an ear infection because she has been touching her ear a lot recently.  The doctor checked and there is nothing wrong with her ear.  It would appear that she has just recently discovered her right ear and enjoys playing with it and nothing more.  That was our only indicator so we are happy to find out that that is all that is wrong.

We were talking to Liesl’s doctor about her progress with rolling over.  He was expecting that she would start rolling over very soon as three months is the common mark for that but she started flipping from front to back two entire months ago over Christmas break.  She has not yet flipped from back to front – until today.  While we were talking to the doctor about her rolling over she decided to do her very first back to front roll right in front of us while all of us were talking about that very thing.  So she now has all forms of rolling solidly under her belt.

Liesl started her vaccinations today.  She is a little bit behind on them because of the scheduling issues so she has six vaccinations that she is ready to get.  We want to avoid her getting them all at once because that seems very unhealthy and unwise – especially when we are neither traveling anywhere nor is she exposed to any number of people as she is home all of the time.  But we don’t want to avoid the vaccinations either even though neither of us has much faith in them and tend to think that they are just more medical nonesense to get more money from people who cannot afford to do their own research into them.

We talked to the doctor and he was perfectly happy having us spread out the shots so that Liesl will get one every month for the next five months.  This seemed like a good comprimise.  So she got her first shot today which she was extremely unhappy about.  At least her first one is out of the way and there are just five more to do.

We came home and I skipped my lunch break so that I could get back to work as there was a bit of work backed up from me having been gone for an hour.  It was a very busy afternoon.

Around four o’clock this afternoon, UPS arrived with a box from Amazon – my birthday present from Dominica.  It is my white Acer Aspire One running Linpus Linux.  It was a few hours before I had an opportunity to take it out of the box and test it out.

My first impression of the Acer Aspire One running Linux is that it is totally awesome.  It is absolutely tiny for starters.  I knew that it was small but actually getting it into my hands really brings home just how small and portable this unit is.  The construction is really solid and this feels like a serious device which is what you expect from Acer which is one of the big commercial computer makers along with HP, Dell, Apple and Lenovo (technically Apple is not a commercial vendor – they make consumer gear – but they build their equipment like they are.)

The Linpus Linux OS that comes with the Aspire One works pretty well for many things.  It is a modification of Fedora 8 which is a good Linux system but is not exactly current.  Fedora 10 is current and Fedora 11 Alpha is already out there.  Linpus on the Aspire One uses OpenOffice 2.3 and FireFox 2.0 both of which are sorely out of date.  I think that having an up to date Fedora installation would be much better than the limited Linpus even if it uses more system resources.  Linpus Linux does not have any type of traditional desktop or application menu system which makes its use rather awkward.

The Linpus OS that is included is functional and might work well for a lot of users who do not want to have to worry about managing their own operating system although it leaves them with a rather antiquated system.  My plan is to try installing Fedora 10 onto the Aspire One to see if that will meet my needs better.  I would love to see OpenSUSE 11.1 working on it as well.  I will be doing some experimentation.

I have a 16GB SD card added to the Aspire One which expands its operating system space to 24GB.  That is so much space for a netbook with no hard drive.  The Aspire is the first machine that I have purchased with an Intel processor in a very long time.  In this case the Intel Atom.  This model has the N270 processor which is not quite as nice as the lower-power consumption and slightly faster N280 processor available in some other Windows-based Aspire One models.

I did not get to play with my new NetBook for very much of the evening as there was a lot of other work to do so I worked on the HP nx6125 which is my Windows XP workhorse laptop and Dominica played with the Aspire One.

We watched a mix of Murder She Wrote, Kate & Allie and Extreme Engineering from the Discovery Channel.  We watched a show about building subways and one about the making of the Panama Canal.

Dominica was able to do some more work on her class today and was able to wrap up the second of the four classes necessary to complete her Linux System Administrator program.  So at the end of the day she is now officially at the half-way point through the program.

We stayed up until around one thirty in the morning then it was time for bed.  Dominica was working on putting together Liesl’s jumper which she is about ready to start using.

March 3, 2009: Another Very Long Day

The snow is still everywhere quite thick but the sun was out in total brilliance this morning.  So even though the ground was white and the air was below twenty degrees it was still a gorgeous day.  Oreo spent the entire morning laying in the sun panting.  The furnace did not have to run all day from all of the wonderful sunshine that we had pouring into the house.

Work was quite busy today.  I got started earlier than usual and it was good because I was needed all day long.  I was so busy, in fact, that I only took about fifteen minutes, or less, for lunch.  I came upstairs and ate with Dominica but I had to do so many things during the time that I was attempting to eat that my food was cold anyway.  This often happens to me.

My 16GB SD card arrived from Amazon today.  That is going to be my operating system expansion card for my Acer Aspire One netbook which is scheduled to arrive tomorrow.  I am really looking forward to having that system with which to play.  I am thinking that I will probably use it quite a lot.

Dominica was able to get a little bit of time to work on her course work today.  She is now up to ten elevenths of the way through her second class at the UofI.  I am expecting that tomorrow she will probably be able to finish that one and then she will officially be halfway through her program.  Very exciting.  She is making very good progress.

Katie reported via Twitter today that Duds’ surgery on his leg went well.  He has arthritis which is no surprise and his ligament in his legs was torn halfway through.  Poor doggy.  He must have been in so much pain.  He is doing well last I heard.  Katie is very excited to have him back home after his surgery.

Tomorrow is cardboard recycling day in Peekskill and luckily Dominica remembered about it today so we were able to take out our cardboard this evening.  Boy is it nice to have two months of cardboard out of the house.  We don’t have any spare space and all of those boxes just pile up all over the place.

This evening Dominica got a chance to go out and do some grocery shopping.  Tonight was her night to go to Stop and Shop.  She tries to alternate between our two local grocery stores so that we can get some additional variety.  That meant that I was home alone with Liesl and Oreo for about two hours.  Liesl was, of course, asleep when Dominica decided to go but woke up as she was going on of the door and did not start to get sleepy again until Dominica returned.

We watched very little “television” this evening.  I was content to have the TV turned off while Dominica was out shopping and she did not turn it on right away after getting home.  Then I talked to Andy on the phone for a while this evening.  We ended up just watching an hour and a half of Murder She Wrote before Dominica fell asleep and went to bed.

We are trying to start limiting the amount of time that the television is on because Liesl is beginning to watch it.  It is very hard for Dominica as it is so tempting to have the television on all during the day since it is right in the middle of the house where she takes care of Liesl.  Everytime that Liesl isn’t completely demanding her attention it is natural to just turn it on because there is not enough time to really do anything else.  Now that Liesl is television aware we have to change our patterns.  We are trying to only have it on while she is asleep or in situations where she cannot see it.

I did some more work with SpiceWorks tonight.  I am getting to know that software pretty well.  It is very useful for me and I am enjoying using it.  It has a lot of really neat features that I am just now beginning to delve into.  There are still quite a number of areas where it is not doing what I want or expect it to do so I am not sure if it is having a problem of if I am unaware of how to set everything up properly.  There is all kinds of support for it so I suppose that I should start taking advantage of some of that to get it really tuned and running smoothly.

I had quite a bit of work that I needed to do late tonight so I did what I could before Dominica went to bed but she fell asleep around half past midnight.  I got stuck working at my laptop in the living room until after three in the morning.  It seems that late at night is the only time that I am really able to get very much done.  Whenever the television is on it is very distracting and it slows me to a crawl.  I am not good at being efficient when there is something going on grabbing my attention.

Boy was I tired by the time that I was heading off to bed.  Tomorrow morning at eleven Liesl has a doctor’s appointment as well.  This is her first appointment in a really long time because of a scheduling mess up by the doctor’s office.  They kept playing games of telling us how long we should go between visits and then “misscheduling” us way too early and then saying “oh, that’s far too early” and then later saying “oh, its not worth changing the date” even though it was half the time that it should have been between visits.  We were not very happy with them trying to make extra money that way.  Then they scheduled us twice as long or more than they suggested.  It is a total mess.

March 2, 2009: The Nor’Easter is Here

After having been paged out and working late last night I was paged out again this morning just a little bit before I would normally have started for the day.  So by eight thirty I was at my desk with the headset on my head listening to another conference call.  I might as well have this phone glued to my head.

I forgot to tell this story yesterday so it gets squeezed in today.  Yesterday afternoon I was taking care of Liesl while Dominica was eating her dinner.  I was talking to Liesl about how yesterday when I took care of her she spit up on me almost a dozen times and how Dominica had been taking care of her today and she had not spat up a single time.  I made a comment to her about how she had better not spit up now or I would think that she was out to get me.  Then, at the very moment that I stopped saying it, she spit up getting me on the head, in my eye, on my glasses, etc.

This morning the world was covered in snow.  It snowed heavily all night long and there is a lot of it today.  I do not think that there is as much as they had been predicting but there is definitely more than we would like to have at the beginning of March.  Oreo was definitely not pleased.

My conference call was really something today.  It started at eight thirty this morning and they finally let us off at just before half past noon!  I was so sick of being on the phone by that point.  It is definitely a Monday.

Here is something interesting: readership of Sheep Guarding Llama has more than doubled in the past year.  In fact, much more than doubled.  Practically tripled.  I can’t believe how many people are coming here every day.  Thanks everyone.

Today was a total disaster for the global economy.  The Nor’easter that pummeled the northeast US with snow was apropos when you saw how Wall Street performed today.  Today we are at our twelve year low and we are looking to be dipping lower quickly.  The Dow Jones Industrial Index fell to well below 6,800 points today – a truly incredible number.  It seemed for quite some time that we were safe in that it would not dip below 8,000 but now that number would be considered a massive recovery.

Citi hit a low of just $1.15 today and closed at $1.20.  Unbelievable for a company that was at $40 per share in 1977 and was, just a year ago, not only the largest bank in the world but the single, largest company.  What a year this has been.

I have to say, I am thankful that I have been working in finance since 2006 because I have gotten to be right in the middle of the action during such a turbulent and historic time.  Of course, this will historically just be seen as part of the normal economic cycle but it is a bit more exciting than many of the cycles.  I was right in the heat of things during the infamous Dot Com Bubble Burst and now this which is many times bigger.  History in the making.

After work, which ran fairly late today, I was able to go upstairs and hang out with Dominica and Liesl for a little bit.  We hung out and relaxed for a little while but Dominica and Liesl fell asleep around ten thirty or so just snuggling together in the recliner so they went to bed on the early side.

I spent the night attempting to clean up after LikeWise Open scrapped one of my Linux servers.  Turns out that like a dozen or so files were backed up properly but then were not restored when LikeWise was uninstalled.  Argh.  Then, after rolling back all of the config files, /etc/pam.d/system-auth was still loaded with lsass references which were causing PAM to die on me so that I could not log in.  What a pain.  Got it fixed, though, and everything was okay when I went to bed around two in the morning.  I would have left it for tomorrow, but then it would have been hanging over my head.  Best to just have it fixed and out of the way.

March 1, 2009: Hiding at Home

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.

Linux Active Directory Integration with LikeWise Open

I downloaded the latest RPM package (for Red Hat, Suse, CentOS and Fedora) from the LikeWise web site (you need to register before starting your download.)  I downloaded the RPM package to the /tmp directory.  The version that I am testing is the Winter 2009 Edition.

Warning: LikeWise modifies many configuration files and its uninstall routine does not replace these.  Installing LikeWise and then uninstalling again will likely cause you to lose the ability to log back in to your machine.  Treat modifying authentication systems with the utmost care.

The RPM download still uses a script so you will need to add execute permissions.

chmod a+x LikewiseIdentityServiceOpen-5.1.0.5220-linux-x86_64-rpm.sh

./LikewiseIdentityServiceOpen-5.1.0.5220-linux-x86_64-rpm.sh

The package steps you through the installation program.  You will need to accept the license as there are actually several packages, covered under various licenses, that need to be installed to support LikeWise.  If you are installing on an AMD64 platform then you will be questioned as to whether or not you want to install 32-bit support libraries.  Unless you really know what you need just select the “auto” option.  After that, the installation will take care of itself.

If you use SELinux like you should, you will need to turn this off during the configuration.

setenforce Permissive

Then we can join the Linux machine to the Active Directory domain.

/opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli join exampledomain.com domainadminuser

At this point basic authentication is already working.  You will need to make some changes to your setup if you have existing accounts as well, but we can address that later.

Test your login:

ssh -l exampledomain\\username linuxhostname

Once you are all set do not forget to turn SELinux back on.

setenforce Enforcing

The big caveat with using LikeWise Open for your Unix to AD integration needs is that there is no Windows to UNIX GID/UID mapping so your UNIX (Linux, Solaris, Mac OSX, etc.) machines are stuck using Windows IDs.  This is not necessarily the end of the world depending on your environmental needs but it can be quite a pain if you are introducing AD into a large, established Unix environment.  LikeWise Enterprise does not suffer from this limitation, but it is obviously not free.