iPhone 2.1 Goodness

One of the things that's been immensely frustrating as I transition everything in my life (my job, my home, my site) to a new version of everything in my life has been the sudden and drastic drop in reliability of a device I've come increasingly to rely on for damn near everything. That device is, of course, my iPhone. Your primary phone is not ever a device you want to go without for very long. Phone service has become so crucial that I can't think of anyone anywhere that could really do without it for any stretch of time. It's more ubiquitous — and certainly more important — than television, or even, dare I say it, The Internet (though I might hasten to point out that when it's working well my iPhone does all three). So when your primary phone begins behaving erratically, it's more than a bit of a pain. And when that lack of reliability occurs during major transitional periods of your life, well, the expression I like to use is: frickin' annoying as shit. I'm telling you, since updating to version 2.0 of the iPhone software — a plunge I honestly wish I'd waited on — I have been tempted numerous times to chuck the damn thing — the phone I've had a love affair with for the past year, this phone of phones — clear across the room, after which I would pounce upon it and tear out and feast upon its touch-sensitive insides. Seriously. It's been bad.

I'm happy — no, unbelieveably thrilled, actually — to report, however — and this is the actual purpose of this post — that the latest 2.1 iPhone dealie-o really does fix all the crap they said it would. The new(ish) iPhone 2.1 firmware, as promised, fixes all the problems I've had over the past month or so. The infuriating slowdowns and maddening drop-outs seem to be truly gone. It's like I'm running version 1 again, which is to say, glorious. Oh, iPhone! I can't stay mad it you!

Figures, though, they fix it right as I'm getting settled. I guess when it rains it really does pour.

Stats

Sorry for the self-indulgence. I realize that the bulk of posts here have been about the blog itself. This is a passing phase due the the newness of self-publishing. And by passing, I mean it will pass. Promise. That said, one of the great things about self-hosting this site is that I now have easy access to statistics. Even though I'm using one of the cheaper hosting packages, a statistics package is just a click away. I turned it on a few days ago, and now, for the first time in the history of this site, I have stats. And stats, I'm discovering, can yield some really interesting information.

Some of the stuff I find oddly fascinating:

• My most popular articles since moving are the recent Default Shell Hell, the famed iCal Publising post and the one about Sending Remote Commands via SSH. The first and last of which are pretty insanely geeky.
• By far, the most popular means of accessing this site is via the Firefox web browser. I find this intriguing as it reflects my own particular preference to a far greater extent than it does actual, real-world browser usage. Oddly, the second most popular way to access this site is through NetNewsWire, which does not reflect my preferences for anything.
• Heartening, but hardly surprising, is the fact that this site is read primarily by Mac users, or at least by people who are on Macs at the time they read the site.
• And, finally, I'm quite pleased to see that people are actually still visiting this site, despite all the recent hullabaloo. Over the last couple weeks I've had several thousand hits from a few hundred unique visitors. That's way more than I ever thought were visiting the site, even when I was on Blogger. Neat-o!

At any rate, if anyone happened to visit today, they may have noticed some strange goings-on here at TASB. Yeah, that was me completely breaking — and subsequently restoring — the site. Let's just call it an episode of, "When Good SysAdmins Do Incredibly Stupid Things," and leave it at that. I really don't want to discuss it except to ask one thing: Did Blogger do something to completely break Wordpress's ability to import posts? 'Cause I haven't been able to do that now for a few weeks, and I need to.

In any case, it's always useful to reiterate: Always make a backup. And perhaps it's also useful to make an additional one if you happen not to be at the computer that has the backups on it. You know, before you go screwing around with delete keys and the like.

Okay then. See all 358 of you later.

UPDATE: And, oh yeah, since I totally broke it anyway, I decided to try another new look. I think I like this one better, now that I've had my way with it. A little stuffy, but still, pleasant and appealing.

UPDATE: The trouble importing Blogger to Wordpress is discussed and a solution proffered here on the Wordpress forums. For some reason it seems to work using a Wordpress.com login, but not on my 2.6.1 install. In fact, I think the last time it worked was when I was still at v.2.6, so perhaps this is a 2.6.1 bug. Whatever. I'm kind of over it after yesterday's fiasco.

Default Shell Hell

There's a common occurrence in the world of systems administration. Once I describe it you'll probably all nod you're heads knowingly and go, "Yeah, that happens to me all the time." It happened to me recently, in fact.

I was attempting to set a Linux system to authenticate via a freshly-built LDAP server — something I've done many, many times — and it just wasn't working. I could authenticate and log in fine via the shell, but no matter what I tried, whenever I would attempt to log in to Gnome, I'd get an error message saying that my session was ended after less than 10 seconds, that maybe my home account was wonky or I was out of disk space, and that I could read some error messages about the problem in a log called .xsession-errors in my home account.

Of course, certain that my home account was fine and that I had plenty of disk space, the first thing I checked was the .xsession-errors log, which yielded little useful information, and which information led me on a complete and utter wild goose chase. From everything I could glean from this rather sparse log, there seemed to be a problem with Gnome or X11 not recognizing the user. I showed the error to some UNIX-savvy co-workers, one of whom demonstrated that, when booting into run-level 3, logging in and then starting X, login worked fine, thus proving my hypothesis. So began several days of research into Linux run-levels, Gnome, X11, PAM, NSS Switch and LDAP authentication on Linux. All of which was exceptionally informative, but which, of course, failed to yield a positive result.

The final, desperate measure was to scour every forum I could, and try every possible fix therein. And, lo and behold, there, at the bottom of some obscure post on some unknown Linux forum (okay, maybe not that unknown), was my answer: set the default shell. Could it be so simple?

But wait, wasn't the default shell set on my server already?

I checked my server, and sure enough, because of a typo in my Record Descriptor header, the default shell had not been set for my users. Seems X11/Gnome needs this to be explicitly specified in an LDAP environment, because in said environment it is (for some reason that remains beyond me) unable to read the system default.

Setting the default shell for users on my LDAP server (yes, it is a Mac OS X Server) did the trick, and I can now log in normally to Linux over LDAP.

So, after days of researching a problem the solution all boiled down to one, dumb, overlooked setting on my server, a fact I found referenced only at the bottom of some strange and obscure internet forum. Sound familiar? What, pray tell then, should we call this phenomenon? We really need a term for it. Or a perhaps an axiom? Maybe a law or a razor or a constant. Something like:

"For every seemingly complex OS problem there is almost always an astoundingly simple solution which can usually be found at the bottom of one of the more obscure internet forums."

A corollary of which might go something like:

"Always check the bottoms of forums first."

We'll call it Systems Boy's Razor. Yeah, that should do nicely.

If anyone has any better suggestions here, I'm always open. Feel free to let 'em rip in the comments. Otherwise, check your default shells, people. Or at least make sure you have them set.

Google Calendar Sharing

One of my "greatest hits," if you will, is called "Publish iCal Calendars on the Internet for Free," and it's about just that: publishing and subscribing to your iCal calendars using Box.net's free and WebDAV-friendly file sharing service. This method of calendar sharing has helped me (and others, I presume) keep tabs on all our calendars from one central location, but it's not been without its share of hassles and limitations. One problem has been that Box.net has never officially supported WebDAV, which is needed for the process to work. They have it enabled, but any sort of troubleshooting request is met with a "We don't support the WebDAV protocol," meaning all that nasty, angry, WebDAV-troubled traffic comes my way. Blech! No thank you.

What am I, a WebDAV protocol expert now?

Another big limitation of the service has historically been that the calendar is not a two-way sync. This has had to do mainly with how iCal and WebDAV work together, I think, though I don't claim to understand it fully. Suffice to say that, using Tiger's version of iCal and WebDAV for calendar sharing was a one-way affair. That is to say, one computer always acted as the calendar master — the machine that hosted and shared the calendar — and all other machines could only read said calendar. Again, not Box.net's fault. And again, impossible-to-fulfill requests coming my way for the functionality.

But Leopard changed the way iCal works in some significant and incredibly useful ways. When it was announced that Leopard's iCal would support the CalDAV standard, many of us admins were elated. For CalDAV, you see, is a standard that does support two-way calendar sharing natively. Having it in iCal meant it was only a matter of time before two-way calendar sharing became simple and ubiquitous with popular services like, oh, I don't know. Google Calendar!

Yup, that's right. You can now set up Google Calendar to host your iCal calendars via the CalDAV standard. You can then subscribe to these calendars and edit them either from Google, or from any properly set iCal client. Changes made in iCal are instantly propagated to Google and vice-versa.

I tell you, my friend, it is a thing of beauty.

In the old paradigm, your calendars lived on a desktop computer somewhere — or, as in my case, on numerous desktop computers — from where they were controlled. In this brave new world, all my calendars are set up in one single, central location — Google Calendar — and are written to and read from, well, anywhere.

Setting all this up beyond the default calendar provided by Google is a bit of a pain. Google's instructions are as good as I can imagine, so, rather than writing it all out for you, I'll simply link to their page on the matter:

Big Giant Google Calendar Sharing Link

This new functionality, aside from just being plain cool and handy as hell, opens up all sorts of possibilities for sharing amongst other folks — co-workers, family members and the like. Possibilities I haven't even begun to consider. Yet.

I will say, however, that this is still considered beta, and that there are issues particularly with To Dos and Reminders. I'm sure it will become more robust and full-featured soon. But I've been using it for basic calendar sharing for a week or two now and it's been working great at keeping everything in sync. If that's all you need — or if you've been hobbling along with the Box.net trick for the past couple of years like I have — this solution is for you.

Meet the New Systems Boy!

Hello everyone! I'm back! Things have been going extremely well at the new job and the new home, and they're finally settling down to a pace at which I find myself able to write. And, what with the new job and all, I've got about a jillion things to write about. But I've been holding off because I finally decided to move the site to my own hosting provider. Using Blogger for the past three years has been great, but there are certain limitations to the platform that I'm starting to feel, and certain advantages to self-hosting that I think I'm ready for.

So, the new site can be found at the exceptionally sensible URL: http://systemsboy.com

The site is live and active, and all the content has been easily ported over to Wordpress, thanks to some terrific reader feedback. Though all the old content remains available on the new site, I will also maintain a complete (though unsearchable) archive of the old site (everything including and prior to this article) at: http://systemsboy.com/bloggerarchive

You know. Just in case.

Finally, sometime in the near future (possibly by the end of the week), any Blogger URL on this site will redirect to the new front page. And, of course, following this article, all new content will be posted there as well.

Please feel free to let me know what you think of the new look in the comments, if you're so inclined. And do check back soon for new articles, which should start appearing very shortly.

Cheers!