Mark's 20 Percent Time

Just a quick post to let y'all know that I haven't died.

DefCon went REALLY well. The talk seems to have been well received. The room was pretty full (standing room only, actually) and no one got up and left during the talk, so that's good. Aside from my talk, we competed in the Badge Hacking Contest and got an honorable mention for being the only group to successfully get all seven badge types together at once and talking. I'm pretty pleased with that, though I _REALLY_ effing want an Uber badge. Next year.

After DefCon, I became a single father for almost a week as Cindy went to a sock knitting convention in Portland Oregon, Sock Summit. She had a great time, and so did Zoe and I. But, being a single father, I didn't make any time to do personal projects; it was all about Zoe.

This week, since I was out Monday (when Cindy came back from Sock Summit), and I have a lot of catch-up work to do at The Day Job(tm), I decided not to take a 20% time this week. I probably will next week, but not the following week since I'll be out Monday and Tuesday for a family vacation.

Then, after that, I'll try to pick up a normal 20% Time schedule again. DefCon has given me several ideas for projects to do before next year, and not just the inductive coupling for EtherSniff... I've got a lot of work ahead of me this year. :-D

-Mark

I have taken a 20% day today. I'm going to work on puffer, the new chiba.halibut.com replacement. Chiba is over 9 years old now and _REALLY_ needs to be upgraded. I've installed a CentOS v5.2 system about a year ago (maybe more). I'm bringing it up to v5.3 now and will start migrating services from chiba to it. I certainly won't _FINISH_ today, but I think I can make some good progress and move certain services that have their own hostnames over today.

The plan:
- Upgrade the OS (in progress)
- Copy DNS data over. Should be pretty quick and easy. (*)
- Configure chiba to update puffer when changes are made.
- Setup puffer with the ns1.halibut.com role
- Copy httpd configs over. There is a fair bit of clean-up I want to do here, break virtual hosts into their own config files, etc.
- Setup Movable Type on new system. If possible, migrate blogs.halibut.com to puffer today. Involves migration of a few other domains too: 3guys12songs.com, blackmoondog.com, jlm.us (I think; confirm this)

(*) I'm considering switching back to Bind. I really like DJBDNS, but DNSSec is _FINALLY_ being deployed by the root servers and I would like to support it someday, and DJBDNS won't do that for me. Bind used to be Teh Suck(tm), but Bind 9 seems to have gotten a hell of a lot better. *sigh* Dunno if this will happen now.

I think that's more than enough to keep me busy today. Now, to get to work.

-Mark

Turns out, ns3.halibut.com hasn't been working for quite some time. My buddy who used to host off-site secondary DNS for me apparently shutdown the VM he was using months (years?) ago. I vaguely remember him telling me this, but I didn't do anything about it.

So, today, I moved ns3.halibut.com to puffer, and setup ns1 (chiba) to automagically update ns3 when changes are made.

I'm still considering upgrading to Bind to enable DNS Sec, but I'm hearing generally negative opinions on the protocol, so maybe not. Really haven't decided yet.

I also ended up moving blogs.halibut.com (this site) to puffer. Along with the move came an upgrade from MovableType 3.3 to MovableType 4.3. Moved several blogs, not just my own. There were some other changes in there too, like I installed WordPress for one of them.

That's about all I've done so far. Left to do, in large swaths of category:

• Random system cleanup and lock-down.
  
• User accounts (home directories)
  
• The other websites (tied to user accounts in most cases)
  
• Email
  
  
  
  • Postfix (including authenticated SMTP relaying over TLS)
    
  • SpamAssassin
    
  • ClamAV
    
  • Dovecot (IMAP)
    
  • SquirlMail (web mail)
    
  • Mailman (or similar mailing list software)
    
  
  

So, yeah. Still lots more work to be done. I look forward to being able to retire chiba. It's been a good host. :-)

-Mark