Inspired by I-57

An update to extensions:

• Tab browsing: I’m now using Tab Mix to handle my tab settings, replacing all the other tab extensions. The author has been cherry picking good features and putting them in a nice extension that doesn’t crash firefox.
• Sort Extensions Just adds a sort button to the extensions list.
• Show Failed URL. In combination with about:config and turning on browser.xul.error_pages.enabled, this leaves the actual url in your location bar, rather than a gooey XUL error path.

Why do I keep blogging about extensions? Two reasons. First, I can refer someone to the “make firefox great(er) imo” list of extensions . Second, I seem to have to celebrate Windows Reinstall Day fairly often, and this simplifies the process.

This week, I lost a hard drive. It was as annoying as ever, because even though my data’s backed up, configuration info isn’t, and it takes forever to tweak everything back into a semblence of where you were before the crash.

But since this was a complete “RMA the hard drive” crash, I pulled out my spare laptop hard drive, popped it in, and installed Fedora Core 3. I’ve been on and off flirting with Linux on the laptop for some time– running a unix on my laptop would be excellent, because more and more my job involves writing code that runs under unixes. And being able to do that locally (which means i don’t need to block for a day+ on the system admin every time I need a new perl module installed) is not only a plus, but it makes things like Eclipse work nicer– you should see the amount of hackery required to get Eclipse to even RUN a perl CGI script under windows.

The good news: Linux is getting sweeter and sweeter all the time. As a desktop install, i think it’s entirely there. It installs cleanly, and while you need to tweak some things you wouldn’t under windows (a little extra configuring to get the fwd and back buttons to work) but it’s nothing bad.

It’s the laptop support that isn’t quite right in my opinion. Now, I say this as someone who’s done the “tweak the system to death” thing already, and I’m getting too old for that– I want to be able to fully use my computer, not beat it arround. And please, mind you, I’m a very happy linux-as-server user. I just want “everything” to work on my laptop with no fuss.

But here’s a short list of things I would like for someone’s distribution to fix nicely so that I don’t need to muck with it:

1. There are nice control panels for ethernet devices. Make a really nice control panel for wireless, and integrate it with the network settings. I don’t want to run iwconfig myself. I want a simple panel, with easy to find boxes to fill in. And please, someone fix kwifinetwork so it’s not limited to 4 configs.

2. I know x.org has a lot of work in front of it. I’m already very impressed with their progress. But here’s something that I think is critical to continued expansion of Linux: Make the screen & device input stuff smoother, easier. Call me old fashioned or call me a lazy ass, i don’t care. But when I hook up an 8 button Logitech mx500 mouse, i want it to have something like 8 buttons. I don’t want the thumb buttons to repeat buttons 1 and 2.

And if my computer comes with a built in pointing device, like all laptops do, don’t limit the external mouse to the capabilities of the least capable configured mouse.

Similarly, and I know this is hard given the architecture, but guys: If I open up my laptop, i want the screen to change to my laptop screen.

3. There is no third thing.

Oh, sure, there are other things out there. But fix those two and I can be uber portable and uber linuxed up. That’s how close you are.

So, I’m back under windows. And I’m asking for a powerbook. I hate the freaking one button thing but I think I’ll win that back in spades by being able to program locally and just push to the server.

But Microsoft take note: 99% of desktops can have a default Fedora Core 3 install with KDE, and the non technical users will be almost as productive as they are under windows. And if you were to violate all sorts of copyrights and trademarks and replace the icons for OpenOffice with icons from Excel and Word…. I don’t think they’d even know they weren’t running Windows.

And, I have to echo darn near everything stated here

And won!

At work, we’re looking to replace our existing radius server (merit, for which support is being discontinued, and also for which our guest users and blocked users are just entries in the flat file) with something more capable.

We like the look of freeradius, and it’s pretty easy to write new modules for– for example, I whipped something together to check our PH server for current status, etc.

But what we really want is to chain two or more Auth-Types together; if the first doesn’t find the user, try the second, then the third, etc.

It turns out this actually is well documented but this was super hard to find (I didn’t think of this as “failover”), but it’s documented in doc/configurable_failover in the freeradius distribution.

Specifically, all you need to do is this:

in radiusd.conf:

  Auth-Type MyMultiAuth{
           redundant {
              krb5 {
                   fail     = 1
                   notfound = 2
                   reject   = 3  # required because krb5 returns reject on notfound
              }
              sql {
                   fail     = return
                   notfound = 1
              }
              next_module{
                     fail= return
                     notfound=1
              }
           }
        }

and in users:

DEFAULT Auth-Type = MyMultiAuth

Easy enough. Just obscure.

Below, I hope the following keywords will help the next guy:

two auth-types multiple auth-types chain auth-types two authentication sources