./john demystified

I got an interesting problem to solve today! Top on a server was showing a process named “./john” under “nobody” owner and it was consuming most of the server CPU. Our server admin figured somebody broke into the server. And even started getting reports from other servers that others servers were being attached from this […]

Do you want to be a better programmer?

I have been thinking about this for about three months now. One of the major problems in software industry these days is to find good programmers. (retention comes after hiring 😉 It’s easy to find people, but extremely difficult to find good people. It becomes important then, to groom candidates to become better programmers. So […]

Ego and Engineers

Excerpts from The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers: a) how smart they are, b) how many cool devices they own. The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem […]

Asterisk, Fax and more

Alright, I am spending too much time with Asterisk these days. It’s fun to work with it, but it can be quite frustrating at other times. My latest problem is faxes. I am using spanDSP and the RxFax and TxFax applications. Everything compiles alright, but the whole Asterisk crashes when either of the applications are […]

Thunderbird Addressbook with MySQL backend

We have a pam_mysql based centralized authentication. We used LDAP earlier but dropped it in favor of MySQL because we are much more familiar with it and we could easily build or integrate other systems around it. This choice has led to a few complications though. One such is address book integration with this database. […]