Windows security?

AD Domains are no longer safe...

I had to laugh when I found this… and I mean laugh… as in out loud!

Right. So you’re a windows admin that’s stupidly forgotten your administrator password and not granted yourself administration rights on the AD domain to be able to change the password should you need to without logging into the Administrator account. You dumb schmuck!

Or as John Simpson states:

• The Administrator password had been changed.
• The owners didn’t think that writing the Administrator password on a sticky-note on the wall next to the machine was a problem, even when the machine and the ...

Worklife rocks...

... sometimes

Work is good. I’m really enjoying the new job, because it combines what I love doing – working on complex data and voice networks – with travelling.

For the past 5 days, I’ve been onsite in a shipyard in the South of France, La Ciotat, working on a small charter cruise ship.

It was a fantastic time. Despite much frustration with networks and an extremely complex network for such a small boat, I had a great time. The crew were fantastic and incredibly hospitable, even though they didn’t have to, which made the job all the more fun to ...

Yahoo! boffins rock

... in lots of little ways

I’m really starting to appreciate the Yahoo! Boffins

They’ve opened up the various yahoo engines to outside developers to use. Having registered my app ID I can now not bother having to manually tag my posts… I can just get Yahoo! to extract the tags from the content of my blog post.

Which is great, because tagging my blog posts at the moment is a chore, and often the tags I put in relation to my blog entries are somewhat vague. Granted a search engine doesn’t really count vague, but they’re getting more intelligent in their ...

Python can sometimes be a black art...

... sometimes

Well, I went and put my foot in it.

I submitted an ‘enhancement’ request to the Django developers. Basically, Django at the moment uses a buttload of __import__ statements all over the place which bypasses all the nifty funkery in mod_python for module loading whereby if you have PythonAutoReload enabled on your site (as I do on my development server) mod_python (most of the time) reloads the module from disk automagically, thereby saving you the hassle of restarting apache every 5 minutes.

The practice of using __import__ in Django serioulsy annoys the crap out of me. I mean, come on ...

Sleep patterns are such a delicate thing...

.. and easily disrupted.

Fog horns. Fucking Fog Horns!

I could so have done with some extra sleep this morning, but alas the weather had other ideas.

Being awoken unceremoniously by a fog horn is not my idea of fun, and in this day and age, when we have Long Range Accoustic Devices that tend to be exceptionally directional in their production of noise, it’s a sad sad thing when I can’t remain in a state of blissful sleep.

After a week of long days, running around like a blue arse fly and attempting to get lots of things off my todo ...

Synchronisation

Finally some understanding of the definition

Synchronisation has always been an irritation to me. No-one, both commercial or open source seems to understand the definition of Synchronisation. The open source world seemed to be consistently brainfucked when it came to implementations of synchonisation protocols. Either the util was fucked and wouldn’t work with devices other than that which the author of the software had posession of, further complicated by thefact the authors often seemed willing to accept freebies in order to “add support”, but totally unwilling to allow others to assist in the implementation. Either that or they just weren’t bothered by it anymore ...

Cisco VPNs and SNMP do not mix

... no really, they don't...

My head hurts and I’m in MIB hell.

I’ve got every respect for Cisco because they’ve managed to put together some kick ass hardware, which makes my job hellishly more fun to do. Their 2800 platform is absolutely brilliant insomuch as it does everything that you really want to do with a network connection. You can do VPNs, interesting routing, Telephony, Fax, IVR to lsit but a few, and the clients really like them. One box to do it all.

Alas, I’ve found the downside. In providing all this magic, cisco really have gone over the ...