rblcheck:
Inching ever-closer to a working release, I now
have some spiffy make rules for the docbook-ified
documentation, thanks to some inspiration from the GNOME folks (make
dist now does a conversion of rblcheck.sgml into
assorted formats; I just need a clean text conversion now).
The only things left now are a .spec and a debian directory,
and possibly a set of rules for building a Solaris package.
If anyone has pointers to info on building packages for
their OS distribution of choice, I'd love to see it.
You know, it occurs to me that I'm really going
overboard with the packaging of what amounts to a couple of
hundred lines of code. Mind you, I now have a fairly nice
framework for building larger projects within, so I suppose
that it's just icing on the cake that rblcheck has taken
advantage of it.
Work
Did a final tally of systems, and you can
definitely tell we're a software house. I'm up to 33 UNIX
boxes, all running radically different varieties and
versions of UNIX-like OSen, with a proposal on the table for
adding 9 more in the short term, and at least twice that in
the longer term, with no deprecation of existing platforms.
Yeesh. The next time you hear someone chanting one of the
various mantras
of portability, listen to them. You'll make people in my
shoes a lot happier with you.
I still can't believe I'm keeping FreeBSD 2.2.8 and Slackware Linux 3.6
boxes alive for nightly builds...
Reading
Finished Cuckoo's
Egg; the Epilogue covers the author's involvement with
the Morris
Worm (the young'uns in the crowd might need a reminder
about this one), and there's a little wrap-up at the end to
cover what direction his career went afterward.
Overall, an excellent dramatized retelling of a
series of real incidents. I'd recommend this as required
reading for those who just don't understand why
people didn't think about security when designing things
like Sendmail and BIND
originally; it was a completely different culture, one that
we've mostly forgotten in the firewall-everything,
yet-another-DDOS-attack environment of today. I don't claim
to relate to Stoll's 60's/70's political ideology, but it's
a shame we don't all play as well together anymore.
Personal
We finally got Erica moved in this weekend, and
she started her MCSE training
today. I'm expecting her to come home tonight with the same
wide eyes she had after her last administration training
session (a one-day high-level overview of 2000 and some
migration considerations); it's fun to watch. Reminds me of
when I first started doing UNIX administration for a living.
Hmmm. What's with the length of my diary entries lately?
A new-found sense of self-importance? ;-)