Cablevision loses WABC (Channel 7)?

Posted by evan on March 7th, 2010

Wow. Glad I left. I imagine this will be temporary (like the HGTV ordeal earlier this year).

On another note, I got my 3rd FiOS bill – still running a credit. That’s $43 for 3.5 months of great service. Good luck competing with that, Optimum.

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Free DNS Hosting?

Posted by evan on February 24th, 2010

My Bluehost renewal is coming up soon and I’m really debating cancelling it. It’s like $8/month, but with my email going directly to Gmail now, this dumb blog is the only thing of note at evanhoffman.com, and I can move that anywhere. I already copied all the content to another server but I can’t find free DNS hosting anywhere. Maybe i’ll just run my own nameserver.

MAYBE!!!

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2nd FiOS connectivity problem

Posted by evan on February 13th, 2010

This is the second time this has happened: All the wifi devices in my house lose their connection to the FiOS router/access point (ActionTec MI424WR-GEN2). I checked my wired desktop and it wasn’t able to get an IP from the DHCP server (the router). The “Internet” light on the router was out. I unplugged the router and plugged it back in and it came back up fine. But this happened about a month ago too – I wonder if it’s a monthly thing? Either way, it’s annoying. Other than this, the internet service is phenomenal still.

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Got my second FiOS bill

Posted by evan on February 12th, 2010

So I got my second FiOS bill a couple of weeks ago. After the issue with my first bill was straightened out I ended up paying about $43 for the first 6 weeks of service. Well, my second bill was about $90, but applied a $180 credit on my account, so the bill showed -$91. So basically the first 3 months of service will end up costing me about $43. Even if it comes to $90/month for the remainder of the contract, this is such a huge savings that I don’t see how Cablevision could match it.

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Running MRTG cfgmaker across your entire subnet?

Posted by evan on January 27th, 2010

I realized recently that I had a bunch of newly-provisioned VMs that weren’t being monitored by MRTG (one of the tools we use to monitor network usage and other fun stats). Rather than manually run cfgmaker against all the new machines, I decided to script my way out of this.

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My Apple tablet prediction.

Posted by evan on January 23rd, 2010

I know nobody cares, but I figured I’d hop on the hypewagon and write down my guess for the Apple tablet. I think a “big iPod Touch” would be pretty boring, and not worth making. My guess (based on nothing): the unit will be controlled by eye tracking, and it’ll be able to zoom in on whatever you’re looking at.

That is all.

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Victory! Change Active Directory Password via LDAP through browser

Posted by evan on January 13th, 2010

I had to give up on PHP and go to Perl, but it turned out not to be so bad. Users can now change their Active Directory passwords via a self-service web page that doesn’t require admin credentials. The Perl code is below.  Authentication to the script is done via .htaccess LDAP authentication, so the REMOTE_USER env variable is assumed to contain the user’s username (sAMAccountName) by the time this script is called.  There is a simple check for $ENV{HTTPS} to ensure the script is called via SSL, and AD requires password changes to be done via ldaps, so the whole thing should be encrypted end to end.

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LDAP-Active Directory authentication, Part 3

Posted by evan on January 8th, 2010

So I got everything working with .htaccess and AD/LDAP authentication. Just add LDAPVerifyServerCert Off to the httpd config to let Apache authenticate against an AD server with a self-signed certificate (without dealing with the annoyance of putting the cert on each Apache server).

With that piece of the puzzle largely solved, I moved on to another: how will users change their passwords (which are all stored in Active Directory)? For users running Windows this is pretty trivial — they can do it right in Windows when they’re logged into the domain. But what about Linux users? I figured the easiest thing to do would be to make a web form to do this. The user would login (with the http/LDAP auth I previously setup) and the form would ask for their password (twice) and update it in Active Directory. Sounds pretty simple to me. I think if this were OpenLDAP it probably would be, but being AD, it’s not.

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Single sign-on with Linux clients and Active Directory LDAP, Part 2

Posted by evan on January 5th, 2010

Following up on my previous post, it turned out not to be as big of a deal as I’d originally expected to have Apache authenticate against AD and only allow users whose accounts weren’t disabled. In a nutshell, here’s what I did:

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.jobs domains – $120/year?

Posted by evan on January 3rd, 2010

I saw that Cablevision has www.cablevision.jobs as the link for its jobs page. Curious, I looked up how much a .jobs domain cost. GoDaddy has them for $119! That’s insane!

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