The Stupid, it burns us
So yes, I’ve had to deal with some stupid, stupid things these last few days. But all-in-all not a BAD week. And reasonably productive to boot. So, in no particular order, mixing tech with non-tech :
- Be aware that the WPG2 plugin for WordPress does some stupid theme handling hacks that make it not send the header or footer when using something like the WordPress Mobile Edition or WordPress Mobile Pack plugins (or any other plugin that dynamically changes the theme at page load time). The fix, after tracing through the plugin, is to copy two files (wpg2header.php and wpg2footer.php) from the active theme into the mobile theme. And voila, it works. Those of you with iPhone and Blackberrys and other mobile browserscan now see the Red Wombat Studio and Miss Monster galleries properly now.
- We have our last con of 2010 in less than two weeks. We will be taking Jennie with us to meet the Anthrocon crowd. I will probably be sending the usual Twitter updates as well. You have all been warned.
- We get to play D&D tomorrow night for the first time in two weeks. I’m very excited, and cannot wait to run these next few encounters. The next combat will be VERY tricky, but I think it’ll be a lot of fun. Once they get through this next bit of roleplay. I will be making maps later today, and they will be…interesting.
- My Facebook account has been disabled for close to two weeks now. It will be interesting to see if it actually DOES get deleted in the next few days like they claim it will.
- And finally, the one bit of stupid that had me ready to break faces on Friday :
I am not an Exchange admin, but I end up touching it more than I’d like to at work. Which me leads to remind everyone who IS an exchange Admin of the following :
It is a BAD IDEA to set up your exchange server to journal all the mail to an external location.
Another exchange server internally? sure.
An internal SMTP server with LOTS of disk? don’t see why not.
A gmail.com address? Oh HELL NO.
See, funny thing, when gmail gets over 200 messages an hour destined to a single address from a single IP, they cut you off. As in, all mail for gmail addresses (good AND bad) get rejected as bulk-mail for a few hours. Which means that even GOOD messages for gmail recipients get rejected, and when it lets you back in, you can BET they’ll cut you off not long after after because of the FUCKING MAIL JOURNAL THAT HAS NOW BEEN BACKING UP FOR A FEW HOURS.
And this does not even BEGIN to touch on the security implications of such a thing. Exchange journaling sends a copy of EVERY email sent to or from the server to the target address.
Yes, you read that right : EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Upon discovery of this abomination of a configuration at work, I turned that bullshit OFF, thank you very much, and proceeded to clean up the queues so the 400+ journal messages waiting to go out to gmail got flushed. Well, except for about 16 of them, which I figured would timeout after a day or two.
No such luck – Exchange proceeded to try to resend quietly every few hours FOR OVER FOUR WEEKS until I finally managed to nuke the fuckers from orbit on Friday (of course, that required not only a complete shutdown and restart of the exchange services, but a reboot of 2K8 on top of that…), all the while swearing at exchange for allowing such an abomination and making a list of people to curb stomp should it be their mis-pleasure to ever meet me in person.
- OpenNMS is, as usual, the bestest thing ever. Their remote poller has some quirks, but damn, it’s still the best monitoring package I’ve ever used.
2 Responses to “The Stupid, it burns us”
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June 13th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
No dragoncon this year?
June 13th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Alas, we didn’t get a table this year, so we’re opting out of DragonCon. Also, Ursula has a book due right about then, and another coming out about two weeks after.
Next year, though, hopefully we’ll have a table.
MissMonster is taking the room I reserved, so you’ll have to find and meet her if you can. She’s AWESOME.