It's A Binary Thing

Well. I may not have any writing to show for the last couple of days, but I DO have a perl script well over a thousand lines long that will take a complete ldif pulled from our current LDAP server (with over 4000 users), convert the entire thing over to a completely different LDAP topology from the top down that is entirely dissimilar, then write the whole thing into a mysql database from which a new ldif can be generated to import into the new LDAP server.

End positive results?
1) I don't have to paste over all my users to the new server by hand
2) I now have a mysql backend to my LDAP server, can do all my ldap management with the database, and just push the changes over to the ldap server's BDB backend whenever needed.
3) NO MORE RELYING ON SUCKFUL CRASHY CORRUPTY BDB
4) It's completely transparent to both the users and LDAP itself.
5) All the software out there that can authenticate to mysql but not LDAP? Hey, now I can use that too!
6) My employee who had three years to learn LDAP versus my two and a half weeks, who opined before he left on vacation that there was no way I could get this done before he gets back on Monday is WRONG.

End negative results?
7) LDAP dreams. I've had two now, and I'm reasonably certain that if I have three I can apply for disability.
8) No writing.
9) oooo ouch, the carpal tunnel. )-:

Surprising results?
10) unpacked an iMac because it's been more than a decade since I've played with one, and I haven't done much with it before now, but wow, it's *great* for having a lot of terminal sessions open at once.

Still testing to do (I've been using a much smaller version of my ldif so far), but it's looking pretty good! Especially if you consider I'd never really even looked at LDAP until a few weeks ago, and I haven't written anything in perl other than tinkering with my Insane Book Database for almost a decade.

ETA: tried the full ldif: 4148 entries at 191,066 lines, and there are a few oddities that aren't transferring correctly. A big part of that is that I'm not sure quite what to do with them anyway. I can fix this tomorrow, but right now my brain says she's done for the night.

Everybody has a creepy bathroom, somewhere, sometime, that they've encountered. In my daily life, this'd be the women's room on the 8th floor of the building I work in. There's only one bathroom per floor, and they alternate irregularly between men's and women's. The floor my office is on has a men's room, so if I want to use one, I either have to go up one flight to 11 or down two flights to 8. Since I spend a lot of time on the 7th floor, it seems sorta natural to just stop briefly at 8 on my way up or down the stairs. However, it's a creepy bathroom. By which I mean it is both disgusting and attracts disgusting people. For example:

1) someone (or several someones) on that floor are "sprinklers"
2) once, from the stall next to me, I heard typing. I know it's called a "laptop", but...
( 3) yucky enough that it's behind a cut for your protection )
4) even worse and nastier things (I know, hard to believe) which I've mostly blotted out.

Anyhow, I totally avoid that bathroom like the plague, except today when I was leaving work and in a hurry and it was far more expedient to hit the 8th floor and then catch an elevator the rest of the way down. And, since it's a photo kind of day, this is what I saw when I got there:



I didn't even go in. And I'm never ever ever ever going to that bathroom again. Ewwwwwwwwwww....

Just remember that pic next time you think we state workers have it cushy.

When, in my capacity as IT Manager, I send out an email to my user community warning people of a phishing email that had just been sent out to everyone and remind them never to send their account information or passwords to anyone over email for any reason, the SOMEWHAT LESS THAN BRILLIANT response to said warning would be to send ME your account name and password in reply.

To have the Stupid User of the Year award locked up already by March... damn.

If I wasn't working from home, I may have felt it necessary to track down said user and yell at them to their face. The fact that such brief but visceral satisfaction was only a ten-minute car drive away did NOT go unregarded. As it was, I must say I never, ever, in my LIFE thought I would regret not being able to use the "blink" tag in an email.