Bugzilla

It's my first time submitting bugs on a Bugzilla site, it's pretty good.

Couple of weeks ago, I tried installing Bugzilla 2.18rc3, and after Bugzilla 2.18 on Solaris 8. It's not easy, since Sol 8 comes with Perl 5.003 and Buzilla needs 5.6 or 5.8.

I installed Perl 5.8, but bugzilla always want to use /usr/bin/perl, or a libperl in /usr/lib/libexec. I haven't managed yet to make it work !

Since, I've got my first bugzilla experience tonight, I'll try harder to make it work tomorrow at work !

When you don't succeed at first, try try again !

Arguments ...

As I wrote earlier, I'm part of the PUC Roller, an Inline Speed Skating club here in Paris.

In this club, we are about 150 to 200 members, and like any other association, there are normal members, and members who give lots of their time and really put their heart into it to do a very good job. We wouldn't be where we are now if it were not for these people.

Most often, we, normal members, only see the tip of the iceberg of what is really happening and some of the decisions look like they've been taken by only one member, but in fact there were lots more people who thought out the problem and tried to find the best solution possible.

Why am I writing this ? Simple. I witnessed a case tonight involving 2 of our members having a big disagrement over some details about our web site. Of course, things could always be done differently. Sometime, there small mistakes are made, but nothing life threatening and they can always be corrected. Sometime, these disagrements could be avoided if people asked to know the details before arguing and critisizing, and time would not be wasted arguing for nothing.

Please people, ask the big Why ? question and you just might be suprised and get the answer you never thought !!!

More on LDAP + a bit on documentation and a link !

As I said earlier, I started reading on LDAP. I have multiple sources, a book and some "Howto" guides.

Books are nice and everything, but for an IT professional, they are pretty big and more often they serve as references. The book in question is more than 800 pages long, while the Howto Guide is 40 pages long. It is easy to see that you'll first read the Howto, then setup an experimental/pilot project. On the way to migrating that project for production work, you'll dwelve into the book (or other Guides describing the specifics) for precisions on the finer points.

I recommend the LDAP Linux Howto for starters (I'm still reading it), and it has a price I like *FREE*.

Most of the time, we only need an overview to get the basic idea. Then, a bit of experimenting makes us understand the details. So the O'Reilly "... in a Nutshell" series and The Linux Documentation Project Howto guides are pretty good sources for IT pros.

By the way, I'm planning for an OpenLDAP architecture, and the guide is based on this product concerning LDAP.

Just found out a site where you can find a lot more extensions for Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird than at Mozilla. Have fun !!

Some info ...

Well, not much happening today, so I'll throw in some Web information

• Desktop Linux talks about using Linux as a desktop system, not only a server system


• FreeWare Motherload where to download loads of FreeWare, no hassle, no demos for 30 days. Only FREE !


• TCP/IP Ports are explained here, ever saw a port you didn't know about in your firewall logs, type in the port number in the box at the top of the page, then click on [Jump] and an explanation will be provided

That's it for tonight !

Dilemma ...

We are about to start a support contract for a client, on call only. In other words, they call between 8h00 and 18h00, and we should solve their problem. We are not on site at all.

Simple, hé. Right !

Well, not that simple. First, how can you help, if :

• you don't know their environment


• you can't connect to their systems to see for yourself what the problem his

Today, they asked me if we could start in these conditions. At first, we were supposed to start only when we received the means to connect.

I'm not too sure about this, in 80 to 90 % of the cases, you could probably solve the problem without connecting. It leaves the 10 to 20 % where, you almost need to connect to see what's happening and maybe there is something else on the side that might be causing the problem.

The last detail that I have to add is that we have an obligation of result, unless we can prove that there is a problem beyond our own possibility to solve. examples : A hardware problem. A bug that can be reproduced, that we could not circumvent. But, at some point, if you can't see it for yourself, you might not be able to solve it.

5000 ...

Well, today, I passed the 5000 Km mark on my scooter ...

Back in July, after seeing the metro monthly pass break the 50 Euros psychological barrier, I decided I had enough and bought myself a 125 cc scooter. Well, I don't regret it at all. It takes me less than half the time it used to by metro to go to work, and I've never been as free. I should've done this a long time ago !

I could have bought a car, yes. The idea went through my head for a year or two, the only problem is that parking for the car costs a bundle in Paris, while parking for a 2 wheeler is free. Then, you can't really use a car to go to work in Paris, unless you like being caught up in traffic.

On another note, I went to see "Hauru No Ugoku Shiro", in french "Le Château Ambulant", a japanese animated film ! Interesting, not bad.

Cold Saturday in Paris

Well, I tried to go and buy a pair of shoes today, that was pretty hard, I finally called it quits.

Why ?

Simple, since Wednesday, it's Sales time, so the stores are assaulted for the good deals, so much that the first store didn't have my size in the models I was interested. The second store, well, you couldn't even see it, there was too many people looking at the display.

It seems this year, everyone as less money so they all waited to buy stuff in the Sales period ... You know in France, the Sales period is defined by the government, it starts on the 12th of January at midnight (this year anyway). What a stupid rule. They couldn't let the stores decide what's best for themselves. Naaaahhh, they know better. The government should stick to its own business and let the private sector decide what's best for itself.

On a totally different subject, tonight, I went to a friend's for a gargantuan dinner, boy was it good. She should open her own restaurant, people would kill to go eat there. Great ! I give her 3 stars in my guide (Michelin restaurant ratings, of course). On top of that, we a good laugh. Great night !

Some things will always make me laugh ...

M$ doesn't have enough problems, it is asking for more ...

There windows software (I just can't bring myself to calling it an Operating System) is full of security bugs and major flaws, they go and announce that they will be writing Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware software.

I'm really not sure if anybody in its right mind will buy these products. There is already a lot of companies making the same things and they are not related to M$ in any ways. Moreover, they are doing a pretty good job of it. So why some director would throw out a fully functioning solution for some new one coming from the company that cannot write a secure software in the first place.

Once upon a time buying IBM was always right, nobody dared questionned your decision. Hopefully, it'll never be the same with M$ !

Another day ... another euro ...

Not too much in the mood to write today. At work it's the same old thing, nothing much interesting anymore. I've been here a bit over two years now, and I'm getting mega-bored.

So, I started reading about LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). In short, you setup some servers to supply directory service. Interesting and it can get quite complex, more later.

Today here in Paris, it is sunny and cold. Tonight at the track, they had a good training session, the track had time to dry a bit since yesterday's rain. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that I am coaching a section of the PUC Roller (Paris University Club) and this club specializes in Inline Speed Skating.

On the Apple front, I just learned that Mac OS X Tiger (which will be out later this semester) will work better if you have at least 64 MB of RAM on your Mac's video card. I was happy to learn (I didn't remember) that my iMac 20" does have 64 MB of video RAM, so no need to upgrade to the new iMac G5.

On the Mozilla front, Mozilla 1.8 is at the 6th Alpha version. For those using Firefox/Thunderbird, the Gecko engine in Mozille 1.8 will be the engine in version 1.1 of the Fox and the Bird, release planned for March ...

For the French speaking PC users reading here, go to WinLibre. You'll find a package consisting of FREE software. This package is designed to replace all those expensive packages that you probably dreamed of installing on your computer.

On the FireWall side of the Mac, I've been having a bit of a problem hardening my Mac more than the factory configuration. It seems I'm overdoing it a bit, so that the Mac can't connect outside anymore. When I'm finished, I'll post the firewall rules here, hopefully soon !

Blog Creation ... a bit about yours truly !

Well, since everyone else is doing it, why not. Then, there were the questions where to host it, french or english etc etc.

So Blogger poped-up around somewhere while surfin' the net, it looked okay, so here I am !

And, of the french or english language, french is my mother tongue but I've got to keep up with english and there is a lot more people speaking/reading english on this planet, so english it is.

A bit about me ! I was born in Montréal, Canada. At 25, I decided to come over here in Paris (the beautiful), France. About 4 years later, I went back to Montréal for a short while. I, finally, came back to Paris in October 95. Since then, Paris has been my base of operation, and I worked in London, Jakarta, Basel, with short stints in Frankfurt, Hong-Kong, Tel-Aviv and Montréal.

I'm a Unix Sys Admin / Architect, and working mostly on Solaris 8 now and Red Hat AS 3. We have over a thousand Unix machines at work. At home, I've been using an iMac 20" since december 2003. I'm NOT going back to buying a PC, ever !

What will I talk about here. Well, like the title of the blog says, about everything that comes to my mind, subjects I've been thinking about for a while, what is happening in my life or around the corner, we'll see.

That's about it for now,

Ritchie