The Tiger Card office handles all requests to OIT for PU NetID creation and all that that entails. This usually takes place within a 24 hour window based on what I can only assume is start or appointment date for the individual. In my case I needed to find this out for a guest appointment, but I suspect that the accounts for faculty and graduate students are created on different schedules; I’ve seen them months in advance.
Since upgrading my departmental website to Mambo, I’ve seen significantly more hacking attempts. This should have been expected as I have moved to a known software framework that’s executing a lot more than read calls to service Apache’s GET requests.
Earlier in the year I suffered a minor defacement to the site from a known security vulnerability. At the time, it could have been much worse. I quickly applied the appropriate patch and rolled back all of the changes to the system. Unfortunately I hadn’t learned my lesson about the importance of patching (horrible) and had let two more security patches go by without a second glance. That left me open to a similar hack but instead of pages defaced, scripts were uploaded.
2 hours of downtime had me with a snapshot of the drive for forensics and a skeleton page returned to service. If there is one lesson for SCAD and tech support young and old its keep up on your patching. It makes or breaks a secure system, and it deserves repeating ad naseaum.
A particularly easy and convenient way of setting up your Linux/UNIX machines for centralized authentication was the Kerberos server and admin server (kerberos.princeton.edu and kprime.princeton.edu respectively). That method has gone away for new users and OIT now only offers LDAP as a method of authentication in such cases. An instruction set for secure LDAP authentication will be forthcoming, but until then any of my new users will have to be maintained with local accounts unfortunately.
Over the past few months I’ve been taking courses for Apple Certifications offered via OIT. To get me through each test I amassed a collection of question and answer flash cards fed to me via a program called Genius. The program had been recommended by Donna Sanclemente. The card questions were drawn from class notes, chapter content, review questions and classroom exercises. Within each set of cards I rated a given question as to perceived importance. I ran through each question for the Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.4 and Mac OS X Server Essentials v10.4 at least 5 times with the counter resetting each time a question was deemed incorrect. I scored a 95% and 73% respectively. After my poor showing on the Server exam I made sure to run through each question 8-9 times in the same manner for Directory Services Integration and Administration v10.4 and scored a 95%, I’d like to believe, as a result.
Although these cards were never meant for public consumption, today I decided to offer up the cards for the Server and Directory Services exams to those still needing to take either test. With no warranty as to their validity or usefulness, my hope is that someone will find the cards useful to their workflow and study habits. I’ve made them available in Genius and tab-delimited formats, Genius format simply being an XML file. Developing or discovering alternative interfaces for cross-platform use is encouraged as Genius is a Mac-only application.
This material is derived from the sources mentioned above but is in no way meant to be a verbatim copy or representation of the original material. This constitutes a personal sudy aid as it is distributed and should be accompanied by a copy of the Creative Commons License v1.0. At no time did the creation or development of this work take place during University operating hours unless as part of course notes. In the true spirit of community, I’d also encourage those that do proceed to edit this material to send a copy back to me that I might update my own copy:)
Flash Cards [6b88bcc4bf765dd34ce3a14a0cf016b3]
If you take a look at your Dell warranty status for a given system on the Premier Support pages you may see a provider column with the three letter code UNY. I assumed that was an indicator for the Dell telephone support people that we have a warranty repair site on-campus. Its actually an indicator that Unisys is contracted to do their repair work. If you have someone from Dell come out, its actually an employee of Unisys that does the repair.
Here’s a neat little open source application project I stumbled upon today that’s neat from the ‘Financial Engineering’ half of my department:
“A web-based prediction market (Idea Futures) system. In prediction markets, the commodities traded are claims about future events; the market price gives a consensus probability about the event’s likelihood of coming true.”
I buy a lot of drives. This guide to the latest high capacity offerings may come in handy.
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