Today I finished with the tax returns, three 1065 returns and two 1040 returns. This two days early for me!

I added two MSNBC webparts, weather & news, to the intranet site. We were running out of water in our cistern and rain has been forecast for the last couple of days. I typically check the weather at least once a day so this will save me some clicks. While I was at it I added the news webpart and a page viewer webpart for the Google search. My first choice for the Google search was the form webpart but I couldn't get it to work.

“This article describes how to specify the icon that Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services uses to represent Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents that are stored in document libraries.“

I couldn't get the sqlagent for sharepoint to run so I went searching for the answer again. This time I am writing it down, http://www.dbforums.com/t768589.html. Delete the guid and it is happy.

Here's the best birthday card I got…or at least the funniest! Oh, by the way, Cooper is a dog and Norman is a cat. I don't get any respect from furry animals!

SBS creates a group called Power Users. The default SBS installation puts all users into this group. I could not log in to ssh with a normal userid but I could log in with the Administrator userid. I finally found that power users were denied “local log in” in the default Domain controllers policy.

I did not have this problem with Samba when I was running W2K but evidently I cannot use Samba's version of SMB with Windows 2003 server. I get the following message:

cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.
26595: protocol negotiation failed
SMB connection failed

Evidently Andrew feels this is a problem with SMBFS, http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2003-December/076388.html,  and we should move to CIFS. The bad news is that CIFS is supported in the 2.4 kernel via a patch. The 2.6 kernel supports CIFS. I guess I will put this project off until Fedora Core 2 is released. I have other options if this becomes an issue.

Today I spent a lot of time playing with NIS and Samba. I am trying to finalize my connectivity between Fedora and W2K3. I have Unix Services installed on the Windows Server and it offers NIS. After playing with it and learning a lot more about it, I have decided not to use it. The key is Samba and Kerberos. If I get Samba and Kerberos correctly configured, then NIS would be redundant. The best resource I have found is http://www.wlug.org.nz/ActiveDirectorySamba but I do not have it working yet. The login and mount is not working even though I have joined the computer to the domain and modified the login pam. I am still researching the problem(s).

I have never been comfortable celebrating my birthday. So here I am celebrating my 50th birthday. I try to ignore my birthdays for reasons I don't fully understand. Today I did something a little different. I made myself a birthday cake. I made an angel food cake with a nice frosting. We did not light any candles. It was nice.

I installed Services for Unix 3.5 today. The idea is to use authenticate my Redhat box against the Active Directory. I spent most of the time downloading and testing the tools from http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/. Those nice folks have ported over a nice set of open source tools. I downloaded Bash and ssh. I was very pleased to find they had ported over ssh and even more pleased to find that it works. I have been reading the ssh mailing list for almost a year so I have seen a lot of problems with the cygwin version of ssh on 2003. I believe I have NIS set up correctly on the server but I won't get around to setting up the Redhat box until tomorrow.