Looks like my good friend Jeff has kicked a wasps nest. Not only the EFF, but also the ACLU have a problem with his barratry.

Since I’ve now made peace with Jeff, I won’t comment beyond linking to the story.

Anonymous Online Critics Should Not Be Silenced by Lawsuit

This will be interesting to watch.

The Commentator

Just for this week. I’m assuming that it can handle my bastardised PHP code.

I heard about lock bumping from one of the security chaps at a client site today. I thought I’d heard of it before, but hadn’t realised how easy it was to do.

New doorlocks in this house come Saturday.

TOOOL

..goes to iManager 2.02.

“After logging into iManager, you have switched
your login to be a secondary user”

No I didn’t. I logged into iManager and tried to do something useful, like install a module or configure the iManager PCO (Portal Configuration Object).
It turns out that when you log in to iManager 2.02 (not sure about 2.5, haven’t packet traced this yet), it actually does two logins. The first is an LDAP over SSL login to the server specified in the PortalServlet.properties file. The second login you never see, it’s meant to be a transparent login to the tree via NDAP and this error means that it can’t do that. In my case, it was the fact that the eDirectory tree (PETES_TREE, in my case) couldn’t be resolved by any method – SLP, DNS or /etc/hosts, so the process gave up, logged me in as the anonymous user then complained when I wanted to do something pretty important like configuring the portal.

The problem is that iManager needs jclient, and that needs some way to find a tree. SLP is good, DNS is also good. An /etc/hosts entry that specifies the tree name is easy, but probably less manageable for a large tree. For a few servers though, it’s a no-brainer. At the very least, try the hosts file solution if you’re having this kind of problem, just to eliminate it. My hosts file now looks like this on the server..

192.168.0.9 obsidian
192.168.0.10 talshiar.site talshiar PETES_TREE

If anyone (jclient or some other NCP client on the server) ever wants to talk to PETES_TREE, they go to talshiar first, the master replica of the root partition.

That might save someone an hour or two. I could have done with this today.

Updated 16/7/2005
I’ve republished the article in question despite the current legal harassment from Jeff Merkey. ‘Free Speech’ as a notion is often trotted out under false pretences, but I feel that in this case, my statement of facts as I see them shouldn’t be supressed by the threat of legal action.

I’ve recently had to pull an article that I’d published due to some legal comments from abroad. Thanks for the messages of support from those who have emailed me so far, but I probably won’t be saying anything about the subject for the time being.

With a bit of luck, the matter will be resolved in a short time.