I’ve had some time at work this week to get a lot done on our intranet site. We moved to a new server as noted in the previous post and I also took the development server and upgraded MySQL to the latest development version (4.1.1a).

One of the problems I ran into was a couple web applications erroring out after the upgrade:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

Come to find out, MySQL 4.1 has implemented a new password hasing function which isn’t supported by a number of apps yet, such as PHP (or at least not in the version I was using).

MySQL has documented this on their site: MySQL Manual 5.3.11 Password Hashing in MySQL 4.1 and all I had to do was set the web application users’s account password using the OLD_PASSWORD() function.

Besides that, the only other thing I had a problem with was when I was editing a document in the wrong directory and wondering why the changes weren’t taking effect…I should have listened to Jeremy

While moving a website from an old workstation running Windows XP to a new server running Windows Server 2003, I had to map one directory on the website back to a share on the old server. I had a little trouble doing so…

Although both servers are on the same domain, I don’t have access to manager user accounts on said domain. So I figured if I added a user account on the old server, I could use that account to connect back to it. Well, try as I might, setting up an IIS 6.0 Virtual Directory to connect back to a share on the older server with a local user account just would not work. The web server would just give me an HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error) when I tried to access that directory. If I put in a domain account (mine), it would work, but I didn’t want to do that because I’m paranoid.

What I eventually had to do to make it work was add a user account with the same name and password to both servers. What a royal pain in the toush!

18 day(s), 21 hour(s), 8 minute(s), 0 second(s)

That’s how long my laptop has been up and running. This evening, I resumed it from standby and 9/10 of my applications died upon coming back from standy. I guess that’s why you have to reboot on occasion.

Yes, I left chapstick in my pants and put them through the wash…and the dryer. Now all the clothes in that load - most of my work clothes - have little chapstick spots all over them.

I run Debian Stable (woody) because I enjoy the superb quality of their software. Occasionally, however, I have the need for more recent software than the Debian Stable archives provide for. SpamAssassin, for example, is what I use to cut down the massive amounts of spam I have coming in to old accounts. Running the latest and greatest version of this is to my benefit in order to best identify recent spam. But how to continue using Debian’s wonderful APT packaging system with the latest software? I could use the unstable archives, but those usually require other versions of core system software.
Norbert Tretkowski’s (aka nobse) Backports to the rescue!

Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it’s possible) on a stable Debian distribution.

What a wonderful solution.

My thanks to nobse for providing this invaluable service.

I had this odd dream last night where there was a tsunami in Chicago. As I was walking into the Sears Tower, I looked over my shoulder and saw this giant wave coming towards the city from the lake. I ran inside and up a bunch of stairs. As I looked outside again, the wave came crashing down and the water level started to rise. I kept running up. It wasn’t as if I was scared, I was just trying to get to a safe level. The water eventually came up to the 200th floor (I know, there are only 110 stories). I was eventually rescued by this cruise-liner type ship that was going around. It was quite odd because I could see the tops of many other buildings and this ship was just weaving in and out of them almost nonchalantly. Meanwhile, there was the thought in the back of my head, that this tsunami and the ensuing flood was somehow caused by terrorists…

Then the ship headed back to the Sears Tower to load up on some supplies. As it was “docking” it hit another building and started to tip over. It rolled completely over, though. Everybody was given 10 minutes to grab as many supplies as they could out of a store in the Sears Tower that had anything you could imagine. One item I picked up was an etch-a-sketch…and now that I think about it, this was probably due to the Will and Grace episode I watched last night. There was also some mid-eastern looking guy who was holding a stopwatch up to my face with 2:16 as the time remaining. For some reason, I decided to run upstairs to the 207th floor and ran into a couple of my roommates checking out a room. There were banks and banks of tvs, which for some reason, exploded while we were there and disappeared. Down on the floor below was a bunch of Cisco networking equipment that I wanted to snag, but didn’t have time. By the time I got back to the main floor, everybody was gone and there was a very weird scene which I can’t recall.

Definitely a very odd odd dream. Interesting though. I love being able to remember my dreams.

Spent the New Year last night chatting it up with buds and then spent a quiet night with S. I was all psyched to see the ball drop when at Midnight CST time, I realized “the ball”, as in the Times Square ball, had already dropped an hour earlier. Oops. So we turned off the TV, clinked glasses, and cheered to Twenty ‘aught Four.

I went bowling with S while she was visiting and managed to whip up a 178 out on the lanes. Not too shabby, if I say so myself. S was right behind, but couldn’t quite catch up after I had removed the sweater to allow maximum movement and flexibility… ;]

I’m home again for Christmas! It’s good to be back and relax next to the toasty wood-burning stove. I stayed up until 4am last night implementing the anti-virus portion of the ubermail article. I also added the amavis mail filter so now I can have mailgraph draw pretty graphs for me. I like pretty graphs.

Unfortunately, it seems like my Chicago network is down and now I can’t access any of my servers back in Chi-town. I’m a little worried about this as it seems either the wireless router or the dsl modem is down. I have no idea why either of these would go down and the unknown worries me. It also means I’m without access to my nix boxen and proxy server at home, which is very depressing.

In any case, I should get outside and do something like chop wood for now.

One of the things that always bugged me about Adobe’s Acrobat Reader was the length of time it took to load. Luckily, somebody else had the same frustration and has a good way to make Acrobat load faster [dotnetjunkies.com]. The page specifies Acrobat 6, but I’m still on 5 and it worked like a charm. The way to do it is to remove all the files from the plug_ins folder with the exception of EWH32.api and search.api. The only plugin I didn’t have that the site specified was printme.api, but it seems to be working ok without it.