It seems I’m a bit verbose this week.

First, my ISP is still having problems letting me send email from my servers. I am of the opinion that rebooting a cisco router multiple times a day in the vain hope that I will get the port unstuck is a bit much to expect. So far, no response to my question as to how much longer I will have to put up with this. Stay tuned for another exciting episode of “Help Desk Opera.”

At least that is what happened in my previous post, which is why it only showed up today. Of course, even if I had hit Submit, you probably wouldn’t have gotten a notification…

ISP issues… My outbound email was blocked at least most of last week if not longer. I really have no idea how long, but my mail server does show successes up to at least June 17, so it had to be working until then. It appears that the NCF (read as techsavvy) is blocking outbound SMTP. This is supposed to only affect dynamic IP address customers, but it apparently got applied across the board. An email with appropriate information showing the blocked port got me the full response rather than a “What are you talking about?” response.

Every now and then you have to do one of those fun tasks like change the passwords on everything at a site or data center or whatever. Bloody frustrating is what it is when you have to do this for a couple of hundred unix boxes AND you have to use different passwords depending on what the box is classified as.

Back in the day (early 1990’s), Don Libes had put together a tcl tool kit called expect, which could automate all manner of things. I have used it over the years and always liked it. Included in the kit are sample scripts, one of which is called passmass

You know, sometimes the right thing gets the right name…

Microsoft recently released their new search site/engin/whatever called “bing.”

I’ve seen it pop up on several sites, references to it in google ads in gmail, etc. The next thing that showed up in my inbox was a commentary on this. I thought I’d share.

You really have to appreciate the irony though. Pay attention to the URL below.

http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_561501581/bing.html

bing  
[bing](http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/Pronounce.aspx?search=bing)  
*plural* bings  

noun

Definition:

Scotland: **heap**  
a heap or pile of something, especially a slag heap 

Early 16th century. Old Norse *bingr*  
"heap, bolster"  

I decided to do a much delayed upgrade to the website yesterday. It involved:

• Putting the site into maintanance mode
• Backing up the current site
• Backing up the database
• Disabling all the installed modules
• Removing any non-default content in the webserver directory
• Extracting the latest minor revision of the software and testing that
• Extracting the next major version at the latest minor revision and doing the same (if this had been multiple major revisions, this process would repeat until up to the latest major/minor)
• Copying back the couple of directories that had old settings
• Running a database upgrade script (as the database changes every so often)
• Looking for current versions of all the installed modules and installing them again
• Firing it up and hoping nothing changed

Well, things went great until I discovered that the calendar module doesn’t exist in the current major revision (only 12 minor revisions have come out since it was released and the next major is in beta).