7:30 PM Sorry about the late update; I said I'd put something up as soon as I accepted one of two positions. Well, the problem with that is the company I want still has some i-dotting and t-crossing to do. Should be done tomorrow, though, and I'll announce it then.

In the meantime, people tell me they've had problems getting to my site all day, although I haven't had a problem. I suspect the problem is in DNS; I happen to have the entry spelled out in my own DNS server, so no matter what happens at Zanova, I know where rearviewmirror.org is. I don't know what the problem is, nor do I care; as soon as possible, I won't be hosting any content there. For now, there's a mirror here on Tom's AIX box. I promise to keep it up to date, which is easier for me since I'm not using any of that FrontPage nonsense.

And now, it's off to TR some material for some guy I know. Later.

Spent all day doing more i-dotting and t-crossing. More i's than t's, but what the heck.

4:00 PM Whoopee. It's official-like. I am now the senior systems administrator (just call me "Your Highness") for the Tempe office of Siebel Systems, a software development firm specializing in ebusiness software. Excellent position, good benefits, and the people in office seem like good people. It's a brand new office, so I'll be building their networks and systems practically from scratch, which should be a lot of fun all around. Time for some celebrations, relaxations, and resume-deletions. <G> Actually, that last already happened; that link is now broken. Things will undoubtedly be getting a short shrift again for a while as I settle in to my new position, but there's plenty to do, plenty to learn, and plenty to try out, so it should be a lot of fun. Who wants to come along for the ride?

1:30 PM Hi. Thanks to everyone sending congratulations on the job; I'm pretty happy with it myself. Hopefully this is a job I can really have some fun with. But I start Monday; which means there's some work to be done.

I'm currently working on three different projects, hoping to wrap them up before I start at "The Job." The first is the Tech Review of Bob and Barbara's book, PC Hardware in a Nutshell; that's progressing nicely, although I don't really expect to finish it before Monday. This is definitely a book you want, by the way; I've been doing PC hardware work for almost nine years now, and I'm learning things from it. Recommended.

The second project is my router/server. As I mentioned before, that machine is running RedHat 6.2, plus most, if not all, of the postfixes and updates. I think it's pretty secure; the only open ports are 80 and 22, although the server's now running for mail and DNS. The ports just aren't open. On the other hand, I've not gotten around to giving it a throrough check-out, tugging on all the doors and rattling all the windows.

My goal before Monday is to tighten that box down completely. I want it running PortSentry (downloaded but not running yet), Apache (running and operating, but I want to recompile it with some different options), Sendmail (running) and SSH (running). That's it. No more, no less.

There're lots of tools I can try to make sure all that works; and even when I finish, I won't be done. You never are. I think what I'm going to do, though, is run through my standard script for Linux security, and check it against some others that I know and trust. When I'm finished with that, I'll have some fun; I'll borrow a friend's machine via SSH and see if I can break in. I'm not too worried about "serious" hacking attempts; for those, I have data backups and restore disks. What I'm trying to prevent are "script-kiddie" attacks, since those are far more likely and just as annoying.

The final project is to find, install, and configure yet another Linux box. This one will also be a web server, but it'll be inside the firewall. My intention is to create an X10 control system that's web-based. I've got all the pieces, and I've played with the computer-controlled aspects from Keri's machine and from the router; but I don't want to leave it on the router. It's possible someone could compromise the router and then go from the router to the control box, but I can take a few simple steps to prevent that; for example, the control box will be on another subnet (10.0.0.x, for example) and the router won't have a route or hosts entry for it; that means I'll have to include it in each of the clients, but it would work. There's other tricks I can play. That machine will likely be a 486 or 386; it will definitely be either free or close to it, since I don't really want to waste any money on the effort. We'll see what happens with that one; it's definitely the lowest priority.

And that's it from here; I'd better get started.