Smith Family Distribution 4.0 Released: “Ryan Timothy”

~ Matt Smith ~ 4 Comments

I am pleased to announce the release of the 4.0 edition of our family distribution, code named “Ryan Timothy”. 9 months of effort has gone into this release, with the final product weighing in at 7lb 6oz and measuring 20″, and with no known bugs at release time! Development Lead Caron made several significant commits through the night, with QA support from Release Engineer Matt. The team is holding on any further commits for a while, and is doing quite well. Ryan joins previous releases (codenamed “Marie Caron”, “Brianna Theresa”, and “Amber Grace”) in a full Long Term Support life cycle, with Extended Lifecycle Support as needed.
imageimage

Email Productivity Tip: Differentiate email sent “to” you, “cc”‘ing you, or including you on a list

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

Do you receive hundreds of emails per day, with varying levels of relevance and criticality?  Do you already apply mail filters to route certain lists or senders into folders, but still suffer with trying to triage email that doesn’t come from a one of these predefined origins?

There is no magic bullet, but I noticed a simple pattern that has provided me more gains than the low effort it took to implement:

Mail addressed directly to me, where my email address is explicitly in the “To” line, is generally more important to me than email in which I am only in the “CC” line.  Similarly, email received as part of a distribution list, where I do not explicitly appear in either “To” or “CC”, is generally of lower importance.

<

p>So, I have implemented a very simple set of filters to capitalize on this pattern.  Note that I have done this in the past with Thunderbird, Evolution, Outlook, and most recently with Zimbra.

  • Email where I am in the “To” field and the sender is one of a very specific set of VIPs (such as my wife or boss) gets highlighted a very bright color, like Yellow or Light Green
  • Email where I am in the “To” field gets highlighted a bright color, like Red or Blue
  • Email where I am in the “CC” field gets highlighted a lesser color, generally a pastel
  • Email where I am in neither the “To” nor the “CC” gets reduced color, such as light gray.

<

p>At a glance, this helps me determine what I should look at immediately, versus what can wait till later and doesn’t need to distract me now. YMMV, but I figured I would share.

One of those “D’oh” moments: chown .*

~ Matt Smith ~ 1 Comment

UPDATED: Repair process below

Want to change the ownership of all files in a directory to a user named ‘foo’?  Think this is a good way to do it?

chown -R foo * .*

Yeah, don’t do that. In one of those awesomely awful “D’oh” moments, I did that.  Remember: “.*” matches “..”.  So that will traverse up one level, and then recursively back down.

And of course …. I ran this in /mnt .   It took me about 5 seconds to realize what I had just done, before hitting ^c.  Yeah, my system is b0rked. 🙁

Resolution provided by Simon Sekidde at Red Hat:

On Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and derivatives), there is an easy way to re-initialize the ownership and permissions of RPM-installed files:

for i in `rpm -qa`; do  rpm --setugids $i;  rpm --setperms $i; done

Make sure to use –setugids before –setperms; if the order is reversed, changing the ownership with –setugids will reset any suid/sgid bits set by –setperms.

Greater Hartford GNU/Linux Users Group

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

Are you in the Hartford area, and have an interest in Linux and FOSS, and want to meet a group of like-minded people?  Come join the Greater Hartford GNU/Linux Users Group!

I attended for the first time last night (2014-01-30), and will look to attend regularly (monthly).  Checkout the Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/GHGLUG/

One Year

~ Matt Smith ~ 1 Comment

Today marks the completion of a full year at Red Hat.  It has been an incredible year!  I find myself positively challenged daily, working with some of the smartest people I have ever met — both my colleagues within Red Hat, and the customers I get to work with.  I get the privilege of being able to work with Open Source technologies, and bring them to a great variety of enterprises.  And I have even found my niche within Red Hat’s Identity Management space (imagine that!).

I do miss my team and other friends at UConn.  UConn gave me great opportunity, both to gain strong technical skills, and to experience leadership, both formally as management, and informally as a mentor and vocal innovator.  I place great value in those first 13 years of my professional career, and I look forward to achieving similar gains in my next 13 years!

Need to deploy a quick JASIG CAS demo? Try jasig-cas-quickdemo!

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

My development activities on mod_auth_cas have significantly reduced over the past couple of years.  In trying to reinvigorate my development cycles around mod_auth_cas, I needed to deploy a CAS server.  Deploying CAS is already pretty straightforward — install Tomcat, generate SSL certs, deploy the CAS war, and enjoy.  However, I wanted to automate this process to make it easier to repeatedly redeploy a completely clean environment.

So, I have just posted jasig-cas-quickdemo to GitHub.

jasig-cas-quickdemo is a Maven project that does the following:

  • Downloads and builds the JASIG CAS project,
  • Uses the Maven Tomcat plugin, download deploy Tomcat 7,
  • Generates an SSL cert for HTTPS access, and exports the public cert in PEM format for use by CAS clients,
  • Launch CAS on the local Tomcat 7 instance, with the default username=passwored authenticationHandler,
  • Grants access to the ‘admin’ account for the Services Management interface.

Try the following on Fedora 19+:

$ yum install maven git
$ git clone https://github.com/forsetti/jasig-cas-quickdemo.git
$ cd jasig-cas-quickdemo
$ mvn integration-test

Then just point your browser to https://localhost:8443/cas , and you should see the default CAS login screen.

Check out the README for more information.