Took a week off–visiting Pawley’s Island and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina and Sunset Beach in North Carolina. Spent most of my time at Sea Trail 
(too bad I don’t play golf but I did enjoy chasing the alligators). This stub of a photo comes from Pawley’s Island (sort of the antimatter Myrtle Beach). Came back last Sunday and hope this week to catch up on a few things that were left hanging as I drove away.
A final note on our Solaris 10 upgrade
Today, two full weeks after completing the Solaris 10 upgrade on our Voyager server, I received a document from Endeavor—”Upgrading from Solaris 8/9 to Solaris 10.” Would have been quite helpful about three weeks ago but reading through it was comforting—I seemed to have eventually thought of about 99% of their suggested procedures. Wasted a lot of time figuring it out on my own to be sure but I paid more attention to the process than I might have had I just followed a checklist.
The one thing I completely missed was making a change in /etc/security/policy.conf to change the default ‘crypt’ routine from __unix__ to md5 (before creating users). Is that a big deal? I decided not. With few users and really fine-grained /etc/hosts.allow controls, I’m willing to take my chances with the Solaris default (DES) crypt routines.
As I thought about it, I realized that if a malicious person gets access to the server’s /etc/shadow and begins brute-force attacks on my password file, the fact that I chose a relatively weak encryption routine won’t be one of my larger problems.
Speaking of tips not taken, I also have one to add if the document gets revised—a fix I had to make in /etc/hosts.allow to get sendmail working (to mail OPAC searches and the like). I found I needed to add a line like this:
sendmail: localhost
since with Solaris 10, the sun-supplied sendmail is tcpd-aware. Oh, and don’t be tempted to express that need for local mailing as:
sendmail: 127.0.0.1
For reasons I haven’t figured out, this version of tpcd doesn’t like the IP alias for localhost.
Smokin…
I have two batteries for this 15″ PowerBook—both are on the Apple recall list. I’m living dangerously until the replacements arrive.