Interns

I work for a very large company that has very American style practices. Most of the time they don't affect us here in not-america, but the tradition of internship is one that my company has implemented in all of it's world-wide offices.

I rather wish they hadn't.

We've been assigned an intern to babysit in our very small, extremely busy team. We work with Linux. He's never touched Linux before. Ever. He doesn't like what he's seen of it so far. Apparently working at the command line is something that for him went out with the dinosaurs.

He doesn't seem to be particularly good with Windows either though, at least, I ended up configuring his wireless networking with him. We assumed then that he must have been a reasonable java developer as that's what he's studied. Seems not, after hearing him in conversation with a peer of mine who is an exceptionally talented developer. The Intern came off sounding, well, a little thick.

He is however bright eyed and bushy tailed and very, very keen. He seems to have really taken a shine to my colleague, who with his 13 years of industry experience probably seems like a bit of a father figure, or at least a brotherly type. Shame my colleague is about ready to strangle him - the constant barrage of 'But if you used Windows wouldn't that just work?' infuriates my colleague beyond rational behaviour.

 I see myself patiently explaining that most of these technologies do not scale very well on Windows platforms many times over.

He also seems to think that he should have more 'responsibility'. I think he sees himself as a manager, which is great. My team already has plenty of management and I fully support his wish to be a manager.

Far, far away from me.

Little piggie, little piggie let me in.

I love how BigCorp^(tm) think it's a great idea to use a Windows domain controller (ADS/KRB5) to authenticate their Linux users against.

What a marvelous idea! It means we can all have a single password throughout the organization!

It sounds great in a perfect world, where:

• Networks/interfaces don't fail.
• Accounts are not locked out when a user attempts to autheticate more than once every 5 seconds (really nasty when attempting to do something like: for i in `cat hosts.txt`; do ssh $i /bin/something; done )
  
• Machines and the DC don't always match up time (particularly across large subnets regions/physical locations.

The one that gets me....

1. Lose connectivity to the subnet that contains the Windows Domain Controllers.
2. Customer raises issue 'Can't login'.
3. Customer expects us to 'fix the issue'.
4. We can't even login (even on the console as root with a local password), as the pam config specifies it needs to check the KRB5 realms.
5. Customer gets narky.
6. Customer is aware of the issue, but refuses to acknowledge it as a problem.
   

The solution... sit it out until hopefully the network comes back. Failing that.. a reboot using the boot option of 'single'. That's if the customer allows you to reboot the machine.

The joys of corporate stupidity. *sigh*

and all the cake is gone

The project I'm currently being punished with has gone wrong in far too many ways to count, but today's is extra fun.

Throughout the project we've been plagued with DNS issues - the customer manages their own DNS in this environment, and the server I'm currently setting up has had it's IP address recycled from a recently decomissioned development box.

They updated the A record for the server when it was comissioned - but it seems they forgot all about reverse. For a long time the A record and the PTR didn't match, which caused all sorts of grief with software that expected the reverse DNS to resolve to the name they had in their configuration.

We finally managed to convince the customer to fix up this issue. Except that it seems they've painted themselves into a corner.

KB: "Windows 2003 AD does not allow you to delete DNS names with uppercase letters"

They made the entry in all uppercase, and it seems that means we're basically stuck with it. Even better, while stuffing around today they managed to make it not resolve to anything at all, so now kerberos is refusing to work. No-one can log in. At all.

I'm going to go and have some coffee since I can't actually get onto this box to do any work. Yay!