Up there with Randy Bender is this lady:

Gay Horney

I’m pretty glad we stuck with names like Luke and Mark for our boys. KISS, as they say.

This sort of slipshod rubbish is why security on the internet is so hosed these days. If Dell can’t be trusted to get an SSL certificate that has the right name of the server, who can? Schoolboy error, as Ron Manager would say.

The danger here is that people start to see this kind of crap, and blindly click on ‘OK’. If it’s Dell, it must be safe, right? The next time they see this kind of popup, it’s less scary, so just click on the OK button and you’ll be fine, don’t worry about the implications, just a minor mistake.

No wonder people still fall for phishing tricks and 419 chain emails. The example from ‘The Experts’ is pretty piss poor.

I had to do some coding this week, the first time in a long while. The PHP script I was writing was a straightforward “lookup the MySQL table” type jobbie which then created an eDirectory account if the details supplied by the user matched what the database held. All well and good.

Then I had to create an alias to point to a user object. Straightforward enough, mormally, but how to do it via LDAP? There wasn’t much help available, but I got there in the end. Here’s the code that does the name and alias creation.

// prepare data for adding user account.
$password = randompassword();
$info["firstname"]=$firstname;
$info["sn"]=$surname;
$info["fullname"] = $firstname . ” ” . $surname;
$info["mail"]=$emailname . “@itnet.ie”;
$info["objectclass"]=”User”;
$info["userPassword"]=$password;
$info["description"]=”Banner ID: ” . $id;

// Build up the full user DN that we’re about to try to create.

$object_dn = “cn=” . $emailname . “, ou= ” . $year . “,ou=” . $context . $base;
if ($debug) {
echo “In createLDAPAccount: User data is ” . $object_dn . “
“;
}

// prepare data for adding alias to user account (NDS alias object)
$alias["objectclass"] = “aliasObject”;
$alias["aliasedObjectName"] = $object_dn;
$alias["cn"] = $id;
$alias_dn = “cn=” . $id . “,ou= ” . $year . “,ou=” . $context . $base;

// Check to see if this user exists already.

$filter=”(cn=$emailname)”;
$search_result=ldap_search($ds, $base_dn, $filter);
$existing_user = ldap_get_entries($ds, $search_result);

//User account exists. Print error message and stop.

if ($existing_user["count"] > 0) {
// if ($debug) { echo “
Duplicate name in directory:”; }
$resultspage->assign(“errortext”,”The requested login name is already taken, please try again”);
$resultspage->display(‘template2.tpl’);
exit;
}
else
{
// add data to directory
if(!(ldap_add($ds, $object_dn, $info))) {
$resultspage->assign(‘errortext’,”An attempt to add your account to the system failed. Please
contact the helpdesk”);
$resultspage->display(‘template2.tpl’);
exit;
}
else {
// Add Alias in the same context….

if(!(ldap_add($ds, $alias_dn, $alias))) {
$resultspage->assign(‘errortext’,”An attempt to add your alias to the system failed. Please contact the helpdesk”);
$resultspage->display(‘template2.tpl’);
exit;

As an aside, I’m working too much and need some time off.

Well, I finally got there. A few hiccups on the way. Beta3 had a funny bug that made the USB keyboard and key useless. I had to drag out a PS/2 keyboard to modprobe the uhci and ehci modules to get them working. The bugger was that the network was also dead due to another bug, so I couldn’t SSH into the machine to do this.

Did an update to opensuse 10 B4 and all is well. Sound came back, NX server is still running, mouse and keyboard doing their thing and even Doom 3 is working after I reinstalled the nvidia driver. Pretty good.

I managed to do my expenses today remotely, by NXing into my home PC, and from there, NXing to Jude’s WinXP machine to open an IE6 browser session to our intranet to access the IE only expenses application. Talk about jumping through hoops to get a simple thing done, but it only takes 30 seconds per connection, so…

I’ve grabbed the torrent for openSUSE 10 beta 3 and decided to bite the bullet, skip the installation into VMware to test it and instead, just install over my home system using the “System Update” feature, using mounted isos on the existing file system. Andreas has written a wee script to setup the installation source. Works like a charm!

The great thing about Linux is that I’m still able to work while such a huge update is going on. No doubt there’s things I shouldn’t do, but web browsing, email and akgregator are working fine while all that stuff up there is being installed.

Moment of truth in 46:41…will the thing boot?