« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
October 27, 2005
Solaris 10g Box locked down and readied for Oracle 10g
Since I was sick last week, this was the first time for me to participate in the Unix/Solaris + Oracle 10g group. The goal of this group is to install Solaris 10 on a box from scratch (which they did last week), lock down the security on the box, then install Oracle 10g on it.
This week Shaun, Mike Ellis, Dale, and myself worked on locking down security on the box. We were given a list of commands from Travis and Troy. We executed these commands, which did such things as lock down access to certain directories to root; disabled services such as FTP, Telnet, and smtp; and changed the default shell to tcsh. We actually screwed up the tcsh part (put in tsch by mistake). This was interesting because when we went to log in after a reboot, all we got was an error message saying there was no shell. Travis rescued us, though, and showed us how to use stop+a to get a command line, then go in and fix the error. The box then booted up just fine.
The next thing we did was to modify the /etc/system file by adding oracle parameters. This is required before performing the actual 10g install. Mike Ellis looked up the meaning of the parameters, and we entered these values:
shmmax=4294967295
shmmin=1
shmni=100
shmseg=10
semmsl=256 (this is 10 + max processes allowed by the db)
semmns=430
semopm=300 (we originally had 100, recommended is 500, we averaged)
semvmx=32767
Next week we will do the Oracle 10g install and see if these parameters are good enough for it to work!
While modifying the /etc/system file, Shaun demonstrated his VI editing skills, and shared with each of us a VI reference sheet he had. We all need some work on our VI skills. Travis gave us a few pointers as well.
In summary, this was not the most exciting work, but it was very necessary! I'm grateful for the chance to see how to lock down a Unix box, and was able to get a good grasp on it in a short amount of time. I'll probably get a good grasp on VI about the same time h, e, double hockeysticks freezes over.....
Posted by rossm at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2005
SWAMP Products Module Comes Together
Continuing with the Projects module rebuild. I've got a decent looking Beta of the main form put together, which combines the old form we used with the new financial data that needs to be tracked.
Here's a screen shot. (If you go to the Physical Plant category, you can see the whole thing.)
The financial data is primarily going to be entered by hand for now, and we will attempt to automate that process as we move forward. The form accumulates a total at the bottom which can be easily compared to the total funds available. Not bad!
Posted by rossm at 1:58 PM | Comments (0)
Putting PDF files on the Web
While this item doesn't fit exactly into this category, it seemed like a good place to describe the process of creating a PDF file and getting it on the web.
Why would you want to know this? Well, it is certainly useful for putting just about any Word or text document onto the web. If you use the Adobe PDF file format, then others can either read or print out the document, or any part of it. Have you ever tried simulating a complex document using HTML? It is not easy! The PDF files are easy to create and display!
Tools Required: You will need to acquire Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional. The free Adobe reader only reads PDF's, it will not create them. I ordered an educational license from Tricia for $47.50. This is not one of those expensive Adobe products like PageMaker or Designer, so the cost is reasonable. You create the PDF with Acrobat Pro, and then anyone with the free reader can view or print it.
I am no expert at this (yet!) but here's a good example of one way I've already used this. Tom Neal had a magazine article he wanted to send out to about 14 other persons. The article is 5 pages long and is in color. How can you do this? This is no easy thing. The first thing I try is a black and white scan. No good because the background over the text is blue, the letters are darker blue, and the whole thing is an illegible mess. Scanning as a color document to a jpg file is OK, except you need to use a pretty high resolution and each page's file is close to 1 MB. There must be a better way.
Enter Acrobat Pro. The scan was still tricky, because if I scanned the page directly into a PDF, it was nearly 10 MB per page. Waaay too big! BUT, if I scan to a file and select PDF when I go to save, I get a nice looking, legible file of about 200K per page. Much better!
To make a long story short, I scanned in the 5 pages, each page in it's own file, then opened up Acrobat Pro. There under File -> Create PDF -> From Multiple Files, it was easy to put the pages into one "binder" file. The whole thing was less than 1 MB when done, which is still pretty big, but at least usable.
The second project I've tried was to put a New Project Form into SWAMP for the project managers to use. This form is pretty simple, but has the WOU logo on it, a bunch of bullets, and some text. Well, just thinking about the HTML it was going to take to mimic this form was giving me a headache. Why not a PDF? No reason at all. After you install Acrobat Pro, you have a new tool bar in Word. You open the Form, click on the Adobe tool, and save the document in Adobe PDF format. Then I copied the PDF to an image directory and put an href anchor tag in pointing to the document, and voila! You click on the link and it opens the document. Very Slick!
In summary, this is what I've learned so far. To create Adobe PDF's you need Acrobat Pro. Not the free reader, and not the fancier PageMaker type Adobe products either. Once this is installed it is a pretty straightforward process to use the PDF in some way to publish a fairly complicated form, or to put together a long article - even using color. So, give it a try!
Posted by rossm at 1:10 PM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2005
SWAMP Projects Module to Be Revamped
One of the things I pride myself on with SWAMP is it's flexibility. Whenever there is a need for modification, this can usually be accomplished with a reasonable amount of effort. Well, the Projects module is putting me to the test!
Our director, Tom Neal, has been pushing for a Projects form that can show him the overall financial status of a funding source, in addition to the usual project data that we track. I've written before on the myriad problems that make this a deceptively complex goal.
Another thing has also been going on over the past 4-6 months, and that is that no new projects are being entered into the SWAMP module. So the information has become stale. I believe this is mostly due to the rather cumbersome project initiation process we currently use.
These two things tie together, because there is no way that we'll ever get a good financial summary if we don't track EVERY project under a particular funding source.
So, in a moment of weakness, I decided to revamp the whole Projects module, from A to Z. Some work has already been done revamping the project initiation process, which will be put to the project managers next week. Also, a preliminary layout of the new Summary form has been developed for their review. It has some new graphics for displaying project status, like these:
We'll see how it goes!
Posted by rossm at 2:58 PM | Comments (0)