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Show me the money December 29, 2005

Posted by Phillip in : geek , 2 comments


My blog is worth $1,129.08.
How much is your blog worth?

Hey there little feller… December 15, 2005

Posted by Phillip in : misc , 2 comments

So I get home yesterday and I am ready to take a nap in preparation for my midnight emergency maintenance window. I get home to find a tree sitting in a bucket of water. Andrea informs me that the tree will only last a couple of hours this way. I get the hint: Time to dig a hole.

Ever dug a hole in Stone Oak? I had exactly 3 inches of grass and topsoil. The rest was large rocks and hard clay. After two hours, a digging bar and two different types of shovels, I manage to get a hole that is around 3 feet deep. This is mostly thanks to a tip my neighbor gave me about digging a little and then filling the hole up with water and scooping out the mud/clay.

I took a picture of the tree as I left this morning:

tree

According to my wife this tree will grow between 5 - 10 feet in a year. I don’t know what kind of tree this is, but anything to help separate us from the neighbors on that side.

Directory Services December 14, 2005

Posted by Phillip in : work , 3 comments

I think hanging around / working with Darrell has turned me into a Directory Services junkie. Ever since I started working with Darrell to design, build and deploy a true Identity Management solution for Rackspace, I have been hooked on learning how to utilize Directory Services.

So for the last 8 months or so, Darrell and I have been working tediously to deploy Novell’s eDirectory and Identity Manager(formerly DirXML). These products actually allow you to tie in disparate data stores in which identities may reside such as Active Directory, OpenLDAP, phone systems, various HRISs, and all types of other nifty things. The beautiful thing about Identity Manager is the fact that it will allow two-way data flows between each of these connected systems so your data for each identity can be kept up-to-date in your identity vault, or wherever your authoritative source resides. For example, let’s say that joe.user@somecompany.corp logs into his Windows XP workstation that is a member of the Active Directory domain and hits the trusty CTRL-ALT-DEL to change his password. As soon as his password is changed within Active Directory, DirXML PassSync will notify Identity Manager of the change and push the new password into the identity vault, which will in turn flow down to the rest of the connected systems. Not quite true single sign-on, but getting closer.

So last week, as you can tell by the pictures, I was in snowy Utah. I was learning a product called Novell Audit. Audit (for short) allows you to log and audit just about everything that goes on in your eDirectory environment. It even allows you to audit your Identity Manager software policies. It can do some pretty wild stuff that Rackspace may, for obvious reasons, never utilize, like report access violation attemps to file shares, print shares, etc. The feature I do like is that you can use Audit to generate alerts by email, pager, or even send snmp traps based on your own custom defined criteria. This is going to be a must to ensure that when a new user is provisioned, their accounts are created in all the appropriate systems. Hopefully we can get this deployed in Q1.

Anyone up for a swim? December 7, 2005

Posted by Phillip in : geek , 5 comments

Did I mention that I have a room with a pool view? Here is a picture of the pool.

frozen pool

I don’t think I’ll get much swimming in on this trip. More later. Class is starting.

Small world December 6, 2005

Posted by Phillip in : geek , 4 comments

So I got to Novell about 10 minutes ago and it turns out the same guy that taught my Identity Manager class, Mark Forsey, teaches the Novell Audit class. It gets smaller still. The guy who taught Darrell and me in Virginia, Kent Gassman, is a student is this class. Looks like it will be a fun time.

Utah

Posted by Phillip in : travel , add a comment

Ahhh, I have finally arrived at my final destination. I am now sitting in my hotel room trying to figure out why, in this day and age, there is no wireless internet in my room. Time to break out the ethernet cable.

To finish off the rounds of pictures, here are two more. I took this one shortly after we left Denver, this is as you cross over the Rocky Mountains flying west. I experienced the worse turbulence of my life shortly after taking this picture.

rockies

This is a picture of the mountains just barely west of Provo, UT.

west of provo

You can always tell when you are flying over Provo, because they have a mountain with a huge, and I mean huge, Y on it. Signifying Brigham Young University. It sure is pretty up here. I miss mountains and real trees. But I don’t miss the fact that right now, it is 12 degress outside.