Networking gear can be irritating some days.  Case in point, the Catalyst 5500 at work, with its WS-5410 line card and WS-G5484 GBICs.

Everything on Cisco’s site says that these devices work together (and they do), and that the G5484 GBICs are 62.5/50 micron adapters designed to talk to multi-mode fibre.

Yet the only cable that works (ie, that makes the CatOS say the port is connected) is a 9 micron core single-mode fibre.

It. Should. Not. Work.

But. It. Does.

Does. Not. Compute.

I even tried the cabling and GBICs in another switch.  Same result.

Argh.

In a set of round-up links, James McGovern wonders if I’m aware of the fact that CIFS is considered legacy for interacting with Microsoft domains. I wasn’t, but I am now :) Alfresco, luckily, supports more than just CIFS for enterprise authentication, and way more than CIFS for presenting the data to users – and I had already started going down the path of LDAP or Kerberos based authentication for users. We’re also not exposing the CIFS service ability of Alfresco to our users either for now – it’s webdav and web browser for the forseeable future.

With the arrival of the internal deployment VM server at work, I’ve started the process of narrowing down exactly how I’m going to be providing server rebuild and management abilities. Prime candidates right now are the Kickstart capability of RedHat Enterprise (and any derived distributions such as CentOS) for automated deployment of servers, and Reductive Lab’s Puppet for management. I’m well aware that there are other automated management tools that can do what Puppet does, but as one article I read said – using any of them is better than using none of them. So I’m using Puppet.

For those who don’t know, Puppet is a Ruby tool that has two halves – puppetmaster on the central management server, and puppetd on the remote clients. All authentication is done with centrally signed SSL certificates, and all the communications appear to be encrypted with those certificates.

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As mentioned in a previous post, Alfresco got put on my stack of things to look at. We’ve decided to forget about integrating it into Liferay for the time being, and just use Alfresco as a standalone product (possibly with LDAP or NTLM authentication). So, I gave a brief demo to my boss and my director today, and it was somewhere just above blind leading the blind :)

Alfresco is some very nifty software. It operates at least three different ways to get data in and out of it – a standard web interface, WebDAV and CIFS. With a few clicks, I can add the ‘Versionable’ aspect to every document loaded into Alfresco, and this versioning works regardless of which interface you use. So I can create an HTML document using the TinyMCE editor, and it gets version 1.0. I can then WebDAV in, copy the file to my PC, edit it, copy it back, and it gets version 1.1. For giggles, I can browse to the network share, edit the file ‘on the server’, and it gets version 1.2. Unfortunately, only the web interface lets you set a version note to go with the version. There’s also a drag-and-drop target executable that allows you to check a file out and in – so only your changes apply.

The WebDAV interface works from Konqueror – I’m having name resolution issues with the CIFS interface for some reason. I’m pretty sure I could get FUSE to talk to Alfresco, giving me a local mounted directory with full access into the Alfresco server.

So, onwards and upwards. Alfresco looks to be a nice solution to our morass of scattered documentation.