The Swede in the middle of Silicon Valley

Friday, March 14, 2008

Sometimes you just want to kill yourself

Yes, sometimes you want to kill yourself and take others with you in the fall.

Since I came home today I've spent a great deal of time trying to collaborate Samba, OpenLDAP and BIND to act as an Active Directory server. By history I've dealt a great deal with Active Directory servers and like the idea behind it but I've never liked the implementation.

Anyhow, as I was reading up on how AD works and how to implement it I just realized minute by minute what a horrible LDAP implementation AD is. Surely I knew this before I started off but can someone really make LDAP _this_ bad?

Anyhow, 5 hours into it I gave up, I would describe the experience as trying to touch your toes with your hands when standing up. I bet there's someone who can do it but it's simply not normal!

To move on I was going to implement IPsec (the horrible VPN protocol) on the same server, but no-no, you can't run IPsec of 1 single interface, it has to be 2. Intellegent ideas such as bridging is something completely unknown to IPsec.

So to add up:
I'm not running any windows computers so I really don't have a need of AD, just wanted to see how it could be done.
IPsec, I was planning to run this along with OpenVPN, but why bother, OpenVPN it sure as hell a much better choice all categories.

Conclusion: Proprietary and old network standards can go to hell. Long live open source and innovation!

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

So what's happened to be due to the acquisition

As you may know Sun Microsystems has acquired MySQL as of Q1 this year. The first thing that came to my mind because of this was; Do I have a job? Do I get to stay in the US? If not can I work in Sweden?

So last week I received an offer letter from Sun, I get to stay 9 months and gets a decent raise on top of it.

So where does this leave me? Surely I might be out of a job in 9 months or I may find something within or outside Sun. Overall I think it's exiting to be a part of a merge of two opensource companies but I'm sad about loosing the general MySQL spirit that has been with us for so long. Hopefully we'll be able to affect Sun with our spirit and create something great together.

3 firstnames?

I've had a couple of interesting days lately dealing with different governmental departments.

Somehow I managed to find out that I was supposed to inform the Swedish national registration that I've emigrated the USA, so I ended up sending them an email informing about this.

Couple of weeks later I received a snail-mail stating that the process was finished, but I noticed something that I found odd. The section stating my first, middle and lastname didn't have any fields for my middle names, they were all written as firstnames, seams odd right? So I decided to check this up, after a couple of emails back and forth the national registration verified that I don't have any middle names, I just have first-names, and 3 of them!

Now this was getting complicated as the name I use is Jonathan, but this is actually my third firstname, so on all my documents it says "name1 name2 Jonathan Petersson". Overall this has worked out fine since I came to the US both with immigration, social security, banks etc. I was simply Jonathan. But the DMV didn't agree at all, my name was clearly my first firstname.

Based on this I now have to go through a horde of paperwork, AGAIN! Renew my social security, notify all agencies, get new contracts and so on just because I was using my de facto firstname.

Luckily enough Sun (yeah Sun bought MySQL if you didn't know) has a splendid immigration department and it seams like they will be able to solve all the issues for me.

So overall, don't think your name is X, it might be Y, it took me 20 years to get to know about it.

Saturday, March 1, 2008