Why My Life Sucks

Let’s talk about Apple OS X Leopard.   The server version.     Upgrading from “Tiger” or 10.4.11 to “Leopard” or 10.5.5 has a couple of issues.

If your a old school Unix person, and keep your stuff, for what ever reason, in the /home vs /Users (where the Apple folk you should keep them, fascists that they are) please be aware that the upgrade is going to make the /home directory appear to be empty.   Don’t panic.   It really didn’t nuke it, despite what some web pages may tell you.   You need to go into the /etc directory and edit the auto_master file.   Either delete or comment out (# as first character) the line that has /home listed.   Once you do this, reboot the box and your old /home directory will come back.   You may unclench your ass now…

Next, play close attention to your mail.log file.   The upgrade doesn’t tweak your postfix main.cf file, which may or may not be good thing, because it DOES upgrade the version of postfix.     Depending on what you have set, it might need to add a few lines to reflect the new options that postfix has.

The one thing you do want to do is turn on the spam filters.     It kicks of the ass.   I created a special mail box to redirect the mail marked as spam to.     So far, in the last week, it’s taken in 23,303 pieces of email.       Oddly enough, Thunderbird marked all of those as junk mail when it connected to the server.   Funny thing that.

As major server upgrades go, it’s fairly pain free.     I don’t want to talk about desktops right now, I’m still fighting to get X11/KDE3.5 up and doing the right thing.   More about that once I do know what it going on with that.

FedEx’s API as seen from a web master’s point of view.

For starters, it has a _very_ odd method of sending data back and forth, which makes for a _fun_ time getting data parsed.

Then their servers just dies at random.

Then, of course, the whole meter issue.

You will note this is NOT my first rant about FedEx or some aspect of them. I’m seeing a trend.

The sad part is they are best of the package shippers.

I haven’t really done one in a while.

This, quite possibly, is the most important film made.

Warning, it’s roughly an hour and half long.

First note: If you HP machine’s BIOS has a setting to turn off legacy USB, and your running Linux (Ubuntu 8.04, current patch level), by all means turn off legacy. It seems that if it’s on, you get USB 1.1 speeds, even on a USB 2.0 device. Not good.

I’m not sure if I’m going to give that point to Windows or not, however, because it’s not technically part of the reload procedure, just the backing up data first.

More as the night goes on, assuming the tornadoes don’t blow my house over.
Yeah, that’s right, I’m rebuilding my home server while the storm sirens go off. I’m a geek in Oklahoma!