eServGlobal is looking for a Senior Systems Administrator to work in their Newlands based office. This role is technically demanding and a successful candidate will need to have good interpersonal skills as well.

It is essential that you possess knowledge of the following infrastructure software and tools:

- Debian
- Apache
- Bind
- OpenLDAP
- Postfix
- Samba
- MySQL/Oracle
- Perl and Shell scripting
- Firewall & VPN
- Network Security
- Linux and Windows desktop support

Nice to have technical knowledge areas:

Sun Solaris server administration
Cisco IOS
Drupal
Netscreen appliances
Mac desktop support
SpamAssassin
Amavis

The big challenge of this job is in the non technical skills. Candidates need to be able to:

- Handle solo, and global team IT projects – usually at the same time.
- Switch between a number of support and maintenance tasks and IT projects, quickly and without dropping any work
- Work as part of a close knit local team, and an widely dispersed global team. Pushing their ideas and improvements into both these communities to improve IT services.

Comment here or apply here

Fine Young Cannibals – I’m Not The Man I Used To Be

Welcome one and all to WordPress 2.3.3. As documented here and here, I had a few problems with upgrading and was quite active in attempting to help others and myself to figure it out in this WordPress support thread. Fortunately a character by the name of ThePhoenixBird both left a comment on this blog and in that support thread with the big clue to the fix:

zend.ze1_compatibility_mode Off

Which was picked up and corrected by other WordPress support members in said thread. The following two lines in a .htaccess file in your blog root will sort this out:

php_value memory_limit 32M
php_flag zend.ze1_compatibility_mode Off

Voila, here we are. Apart from some plugin incompatibilities and my .htaccess file rewriting itself to remove these rules – I think there is a wordpress script somewhere doing this – everything is fine. Now to weasel out all the minor problems and then upgrade the other wordpress blogs that I administrate before letting my host know what the fix was.

Faithless – Mass Destruction

At work we have a Google Mini search appliance box, and it is presently indexing our Drupal based intranet portal as a proof-of-concept for a full blown Google Search Appliance solution. Unfortunately the results it has been giving have been messed up with too many duplicates which I’ve been struggling to prune down, I battled for a few days trying to figure this out and then left it to focus on other things with the hope that I’d have a eureka moment. And I did, it was a major D’oh moment. This is basically because there are multiple ways to get to a page in Drupal, like so:

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/NicePageName

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/node/123

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/?q=/node/123

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/?q=NicePageName

etc…

And then on top of that you have all of the page functions that you really don’t want to index, especially if you’re wanting your search results to be relevant and you want to get the most out of a limited document licence, so you might find results like this in your search:

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/NicePageName?q=comments

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/NicePageName?q=quotes

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/NicePageName?q=print

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/NicePageName?q=add

Not to mention the same for the node/nnn pagenames eg:

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/node/123?q=add

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/?q=/node/123?q=add

As well as links elsewhere and to itself like so:

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/NicePageName?q=/node/123

Or to put it another way, I did a test with the Google search for inurl:NicePageName and 158 results were returned. There should have been 2 results returned for this particular pagename, namely /drupal/NicePageName and /drupal/?q=NicePageName.

Fortunately the Google Mini allows you to enter exclusions in the form of regular expressions, and myself and a colleague had built up an impressive list of exclusions in a bid to trim the duplicates back. I wasn’t even thinking about the problem when the answer came to me – I had neglected to use a range. dee ew aych: DUH! These two rules replaced a dozen others:

regexp:.*/drupal/[A-Z,a-z].*?q=
regexp:.*/drupal/?q=[A-Z,a-z].*?q=

If you’re struggling to follow the meaning of these, here’s a quick rundown. Any URL with /drupal/ in it, followed by an Alphabetic character in the A-Z range (ie uppercase) and a-z range (ie lowercase), followed by any number of characters (.* is the wildcard), and including ?q= is ignored. URLs like so:

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/NicePageName?q=add

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/node/123?q=/node/100

Then the second rule is the same except it starts with /drupal/?q= followed by the ranges, wildcard and a second ?q=, so URLs like the following will be ignored:

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/?q=/node/123?q=print

http://someportal.domain.tld/drupal/?q=NicePageName?q=comments

I was pretty dense not to click on to those regexp’s earlier, my brain must have been running on autopilot for weeks. Oh, and I absolutely LOVE the Google Search Appliance kit. It’s the smartest thing you can do for enterprise search in my opinion. Search is so important to get right, and you simply cannot go wrong with the GSA gear. As far as tightly integrating a GSA and Drupal, keep an eye on this thread, we did consider hacking this module too.

Oh, and if you’ve got the crawler setup to access with a rw capable account, you’ll want to definately block out ?q=revision.* before you point your Google box at your Drupal portal, otherwise you’ll find the crawler will hit the revisions page of a page and then try to follow all the links on the revision page, including the postmethod rollback links – yes, the Google box can potentially rollback your portal, though typically it will get stuck in a loop on only a handful of pages so the damage will be minimal by the time you realise.

Eric Clapton – Change The World

Ladies, I will agree to partake in the overcorporatised mess that is Valentines Day, when you agree to take part in the grassroots tongue-in-cheek brilliance that is Steak and BJ Day

I’m not predicting that I’ll have many takers

Minuit – Menace

On Saturday I enjoyed a good sleep-in, but it was not to last. I was roped into doing a cycle leg of the PetoneMan duathlon, like, drop of a hat notice. So it went like this:

Peter – First running leg
Benny – First cycling leg
James – Second running leg
Me – Second cycling (and final) leg

Benny and I shared my bike, however I did not have enough time to put the slicks on before Peter got back, and it’s a good thing too – while James was running I swapped the knobblies for the slicks and straight away had a bung valve on my rear tube leaking air all over the place. Fortunately I’d had the forethought to take a couple of spare tubes, so I had the tube changed, the tyre back on and inflated just in time for James to arrive, then it was on like Donkey Kong.

Carrying extra weight in the form of equipment and my own extra mass (yeah, I’m a sedentary fatty), and battling into a headwind on the dodgy road shoulder from Eastbourne to Petone, I didn’t hold much hope for a decent run. In fact I slotted into a very nice 120rpm cadence with a 4 gear range and maintained 26-32kmh the entire way, with a brief respite from the wind coming along The Esplanade where I was creeping up the gears and the speed, only to be cut off by some nitwit in a Subaru Legacy, before being slowed by some dawdling old lady out for her Sunday drive… only a day premature there, nana.

Regardless, I had a very strong ride and passed several less experienced cyclists who, besides being exhausted from doing the previous 3 legs by themselves, hadn’t figured windload into the equation and were struggling quite badly. A few of them were on pretty expensive and probably borrowed roadbikes too. So I was feeling pretty good at the end of the leg and the standing ovation at the finishing line was pretty choice too. So I might just be motivated to startup running again and try Petoneman by myself next year… Just waiting to see if my photo appears on the Petone Mighty website…

Update: Picture here in this gallery

I stumbled upon this video on youtube and I think it’s brilliant. See what you think:

There is another version here which gets a bit graphic in the last minute

Richard Cheese – Baby Got Back

There’s really not much to report about this year’s Sevens, I got my ticket organised early, but due to a doctor’s appointment on the week of the event I was not able to weasel the Friday off work, however while at work on Friday my boss implied that I could go as soon as the backup tapes were in. Great, now I was dependant on the backup tape offsiting company to pull finger and drop the tapes off. 3.23pm (the exact time that a bus leaves from the closest bus stop) they turn up, and I was ropable. Anyone who dared text me during those few hours received a profanity laced response, if any response at all, and even though I bottled it up, colleagues could tell that I had a small thundercloud over my head.

So I got to the Sevens eventually, only to find that there was a two drink limit. Well, WTF is that? A standard Rugby event liquor licence is a four drink limit, and it works – you get your four beers and you go back to your mates – you hand out a couple when asked and have a couple for yourself, and when they go and get four drinks, they reciprocate. It’s classic hunt and gather. With two drinks, you’re not sharing with anybody – fuck em! The unfortunate upside to this though is you spend less money, and if you can keep the beer flowing into you at a constant rate, you maintain a good level of drunkedness while still enjoying the rugby. Yes, no longer can you get so smashed off your face that you don’t remember the rugby; only the blur of the party.

There didn’t seem to be as many bums in seats as previous years either, but still, there was plenty of eye candy.

All in all, it was an enjoyable event over both days, but I’m seriously considering not going next time. Though if I do, I’m roping in Sam from Chch, dressing him up as Gordon Freeman and going as a headcrabbed scientist.

Some people had a bit of a shocker though.