Today I've been dealing with sending files to Deutsche Bank. I'm using curl to transmit SAP IDoc files to the bank and then using curl to pull report files back. Working with DB is possibly the worst experience I've ever had with a third party and I wouldn't recommend ever working with them.
I've also had to deal with nasty Windows problems. For example curl running under Cygwin on my desktop PC and on a Red Hat box are both happy to send files via a corporate Windows proxy server, curl on AIX is not. Pulling files from any system is fine but there must be a conflict between curl and OpenSSL on AIX and the Windows proxy because it works fine using an alternate Squid proxy on Debian.*
My next problem is that DB said the files would be plain comma separated ASCII text files. It turns out that they are semi-colon separated and their Web-server server is sending files with ASCII CR+LF line-endings, which screws up your shell scripting until you filter them out...**
* And yes I know it could actually be IBM at fault, AIX is weird but it is easier to blame Microsoft - it's normally their fault...
** Again technically webby protocols should be CR+LF but I forget that unlike Perl which magically deals with this, Bash does not.
My Desktop Adapted for Dad talk has been accepted at this year's Linux'08 meeting. I now have to extend and expand it from about 20 to 45 minutes. I have some extra pieces to add to the story, screen shots and I think it will be okay.
I also have to complete my rsnapshot talk for the next HANTS-LUG meeting and my lean-six-sigma improve stage toll gate review for tomorrow...
Using Windows is like having an Emery Paper Enema, it's not something a sane person chooses to do. It's taken me two days to get Windows to talk properly to one of our pumps and even then it's not stable. It's going to be a real challenge to get all the data out of the pump and into SAP in time.
On the up side it's Perl programming which is good and I'm now confident it will work, even if it's an evil solution. If only we could use Linux or Unix everywhere, life would be so much easier.
A few weeks ago I set up NFS on my home server using version 4 of the protocol rather than the still more common version 3. It all went rather swimmingly and I've been happy.
One feature that NFSv4 has over NFSv3 is that it includes decent security in the form of Kerberos support. I've never used Kerberos before, mostly getting by with SSH, so this seemed like an opportunity to learn something new.
So far no luck, I've had two goes and even with plenty of help from people on the DA.org site I'm still no closer...
posted 22:25 ::
/unix/debian ::
permalink ::
^
At home I have needed a backup solution for some time. I've been rather lax and not had one for far too long, relying on mirrored disks is not a backup solution...
I decided to try out rsnapshot as it looks simple enough to be easy to do and powerful enough to do what I need.
After a certain amount of messing with the rsync and ssh options I've not got it backing up my home server and our two desktop systems all automatically. I've now got to back the snapshots up to something external (DVD or a USB 0.5 TB hard disk)...
Yesterday was a joint Hampshire/Surrey LUG meeting at the Nokia facility between Fleet and Farnborough. For a mid summer meeting it was quite busy and most productive.
Using Nokia's fast and plentiful Internet connection we upgraded a friend's Ubuntu system to the latest version and fixed a number of Apache/PHP related issues. We also got Dovecot IMAP working on the system and moved email into it from another system.
There were quite a few new faces, which is always good too see and plenty of familiar ones. Someone brought along a tiny Viglen MPC-L computer, listen to the next ubuntu uk podcast for a full review.
posted 09:19 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
In many respects I'm quite conservative, just as everyone else was abandoning CVS I started to use it. Over the past few weeks I've decided to upgrade to SVN (Subversion) just as everyone else moves on to git...
posted 22:40 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
Glyn Moody makes some very good points in his blog: Sir Bill and Sir Tim: A Tale of Two Knights.
posted 12:26 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
I have an old SPARC 5 box in the loft running Solaris 2.5. We don't have enough space to have it out an used, so it's currently sitting unused gathering dust. My current AMD64 based desktop system is way more powerful and Debian Lenny is a vastly more modern and sophisticated operating system than Solaris 2.6.
This week I've been playing with various alternative operating systems on VirtualBox virtual machines. Today I thought it would be nice to give Solaris another go and OpenSolaris is a lot more modern than Solaris 2.6 so I'm hoping it will be a lot more useful.
At the moment OpenSolaris is installing it's self inside a virtual machine, a bit slow compared with Linux but still much faster than Windows systems which seem to take for ever and a day.
Once it's all up and running I'll see if Solaris still deserves the moniker "Slowaris", it really did have a reputation for being awfully slow as Unix goes...
posted 17:12 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
Microsoft has all but admitted that the existing ISO Open Document Format has won the current round in the file format wars. Not content with being ratified by the ISO first, Microsoft will also support ODF before they are able to support their own competing OXML standard and they now believe that ODF will probably be "the standard" going forward that everyone uses.
Their grudging support for the standard has been formally endorsed by them joining the committee that runs ODF. The cynics would caution that as they haven't been able to kill the standard from the outside they will now from the inside embrace, extend and finally exterminate the standard, a technique long practised by Microsoft. Thankfully they were not able to exterminate the world wide web and there is some hope that they won't be able to exterminate ODF.
With luck the various challenges against OXML from several national bodies will mortally wound OXML and Microsoft will really commit to using the cross-platform ODF format properly and OXML will quietly die.
posted 13:26 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
Microsoft appear to be coming unstuck in their OOXML/OXML/Ecma-376 plans for world domination. Several countries have formally appealed against the decision to fast-track their ISO proposal, and in the UK, the UKUUG have taken legal advice regarding the BSI for their support of the Vole's plans. It looks like the ISO have even responded to the media attention by suspending the process while the appeals go through.
posted 19:20 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
Microsoft announced that they will support ISO standards for Open Document Format (ODF) and PDF next year. Most open source software already supports ODF and PDF.
After bullying and bribery to get their so called "OOXML" (now called OXML) standard to be accepted by ISO, it now turns out they can't actually support it and it will be the version of Office that follows before they can support their own standard.
Typical, they refuse to participate in the development of a vendor neutral standard, refuse to support the standard when it's deployed, then develop their own incompatible "standard", bribe it through ISO, then it turns out they can support the real standard in their own products before they can support the one they developed based on their own product. Microsoft couldn't organise a proverbial in a brewery...
posted 22:07 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
Sometime ago the Debian team applied a patch to OpenSSL, in doing so they introduced a subtle bug that greatly weakens the strength of any key generated by the OpenSSL package, e.g. SSH or TLS/SSL keys.
Debian have corrected their bug but any cryptographic keys generated in the interim need to be replaced as they are unacceptably weak. A new version of OpenSSL is available from Debian and needs to be installed as a matter of urgency on any Debian Etch or later system. Once OpenSSL has been upgraded all keys need to be regenerated.
The details can be found on the Debian Security site DSA-1571-1. Users of any distro based on Debian such as Ubuntu, should also check to see if they are also affected.
posted 21:48 ::
/unix/debian ::
permalink ::
^
Yesterday was the May Hants LUG. It went very well, a friend solved several problems, I learnt a bit more about X.509 certificates and picked up 30 CAcert points.
posted 14:06 ::
/unix/foss ::
permalink ::
^
Yet again Microsoft have been up to their dirty tricks. Bribing officials, stuffing ballot boxes and generally doing bad things to ram their broken joke of a file format through the ISO process. Alas it looks like money talks and they have bought enough organisations to buy themselves an ISO standard.
While it is nice that they have documented their file format technology, which is a lot more than can be said about their legacy formats, their documentation is next to useless and they don't even promise to stick to it, which given they are the only organisation with access to the hidden bits in the standard makes the standard unimplementable and utter useless. It's just not worth the thousands of pages it's written on.
We will shortly have a standard that can't be used, an utterly discredited and disgraced international standards body and Microsoft will still have you by the short and curlies - if you use their technology.
![[Valid RSS]](/i/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
