IT Support Small Medium Business

As I commented earlier about the compromised wordpress 2.1.1 release, I have always been surprised and disappointed that many FOSS software distributions don’t provide good means for users to verify the authenticity and integrity of their downloads, not to mention the leading commercial software vendors (hardware platform vendors, OS vendors, and ISV). There are some confusion about the ability and capability of checksum (MD5 or SHA1) and those of digital signatures. Read the rest of this entry »

I compiled an OpenVPN RPM package for FC6, from the current release 2.0.9 dated 2006.10.06. Fedora Core Linux’s extras Repository does have OpenVPN package. However, it is more of a cutting-edge 2.1.0.17.rc2. Appended below is information from ‘yum info openvpn’ on a up-to-date FC6 box.

Name : openvpn
Arch : i386
Version: 2.1
Release: 0.17.rc2.fc6
Size : 355 k
Repo : extras
Summary: A full-featured SSL VPN solution Read the rest of this entry »

Without thinking, I said to myself, the clock needs to be set manually only twice a year to accommodate the 2007 DST changes, on computer systems aware of DST rules but not patched for the 2007 DST changes. For example,

• AS/400 before OS/400 v5r3
• Blackberry running beta releases of firmware from RIM (Research In Motion) or elsewhere
• VAX running OpenVMS with older compiler
• HP-UX 10.20 servers
  

Well, that’s not true, at second thought. You actually need to set the clock three times a year every year, instead of twice. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier last month, I started to write a live journal about this “young” self-hosted wordpress blog. It started as a regular blog post. So far, I manually added new journal entries with a raw date stamp and edited the post body for updates. However, this routine got old pretty quick, since one has to manage/post/search/edit every time. Thinking aloud, I guess there are viable alternatives available.

A few options I can think of right now are listed below:

1. a static page and manually update the page with journal entries. (Con: not interactive. no category) Read the rest of this entry »

In order to prepare a development web server running Redhat Linux 9 for 2007 DST changes, I upgraded its glibc from 2.3.2-27 to 2.3.2-71 to take advantage of tzdata rpm packages updated for 2007 DST changes.

• glibc-2.3.2-64 is the earliest version of glibc RPM that has separated timezone data into a new rpm named tzdata (More details can be found here).
• A backend Sybase ASE server also runs RHL 9, but with a newer glibc-2.3.2-71. The latter was recommended by Michael Peppler for Sybase ASE 12.5 on RHL9 to get around certain bugs in the glibc RPM package shipped with the original RHL9. Read the rest of this entry »