I have been real bugged with Sharepoint asking me to login problem. It only does this in Office 2003. I can add documents via the web browser just fine. Its bad enough that it asks me but then it doesn't like my password so nothing works. I have tried a bunch of things but ended up wandering away to my ISA problem.

My ISA problem was that I was not using the web proxy because the http redirector was stopping my access. My fix was to have the http redirector route directly which bypassed the web proxy. I ended up looking at this problem because  it was like the authentication problem like the one I have with Sharepoint. I ended up tweaking and cleaning up the configuration. The tweaking involved implementing automatic configuration and cleaning up the site and content rules. After looking at the log files I figured out only one site and content rule was being used. Authentication was being used on about half the traffic. While I was tweaking I decided to start logging my data into the sql server. It is all well documented except that I had to use the capitalized dsn version in the isa log file setup. The lowercase version did not work?! I now can pull up the latest version of the web proxy log file into Excel.

Do terrorists play election politics?. Spain attacks suggest militants may help oust governments, yet also unite opposition to terrorism. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

I am saddened by Spain's great loss. The loss of life was unexpected and unnecessary. In a way I am sorry for the elected officials. Those who were elected will always be viewed as the officials the terrorists elected. Those who lost their government job by the election will be viewed as casualities of war. Both sides lose.

My son and I went on hockey tournament in Chicago last weekend. I really didn't want to go. I wasn't sure my son wanted to go. The travel hockey season was a real grind . The team is good but they really have to work to win games and the last couple of games were ugly. I guess we wanted to end the season on a good note. We went to Chicago expecting nothing but we planned on having a fun time regardless of the score. Something wonderful happened! They played some of the best hockey they had played all year. They played like a team and won their first two games. The boys got excited about possibly winning the tournament. They probably were over-confident and lost their third game. In the fourth game they played a very good team to a draw at the end of regulation. Just before the end of the overtime one of our defensemen got the puck and tried a shot from the blue line. It is a shot we want him to take but it got blocked. The guy who blocked took the puck and scored on the break away. It was a heart breaking way to lose but we were so proud of them. They really had matured as a team. I think that each one of them understood the importance of their role in playing as a team.

My son and I are going to Chicago for his last hockey tournament of the season. We are both happy and sad to see the end of the season but will relish the rest.

“foo2zjs is an open source printer driver for printers that use the Zenographics ZjStream wire protocol for their print data, such as the Minolta/QMS magicolor 2300 DL. These printers are often erroneously referred to as winprinters or GDI printers. However, Microsoft GDI only mandates the API between an application and the printer driver, not the protocol on the wire between the printer driver and the printer.“

I am not sure why I decided to do a search on Minolta and Linux but I did. I had long since written off my Minolta 2200 Desklaser as a Windows only printer. So I was shocked to find that someone had written a driver and provided instructions on how to install and configure it. I would like to tell you how it went but my Fedora box did not have gcc installed!? Ouch! Boy, am I out of touch!

Patent Central to Microsoft Case Invalidated. Thanks, Sodajerk. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated a claim to Web browser technology central to a case against Microsoft Corp., a move that could spare the software giant from paying more than half a billion dollars in damages, according to documents obtained on Friday. Last year, an Illinois jury delivered a $521 million verdict against Microsoft for infringing on technology developed by a privately held firm, Eolas Technologies Inc., and the University of California. [ActiveWin.com Headlines]

I have written about the Eolas patent before so I was glad to see the patent invalidated. I believe the previous art in the area was very substantial and should not be ignored. The major contribution of Eolas to the world remains in forcing the patent office to try and do a better job.

Building Security and Directory Solutions for UNIX Using the Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Kerberos and LDAP Services. This guide provides prescriptive guidance to enable Microsoft™ Windows Server® 2003 to be used for authentication and as an identity and authorization data store within heterogeneous Microsoft Windows® and UNIX environments. The guidance covers evaluating, planning, building, and deploying a security and directory infrastructure based on Windows Server 2003. The guidance will be valuable for business and technical decision makers, IT architects, and systems administrators participating in infrastructure consolidation or integration projects. [ActiveWin.com Headlines]

This is a long document so I printed out Part 2 Build which is approximately 170 pages long. I had started work on this earlier but stopped when I upgraded to 2003. I would like to use my 2003 Active Directory to authenticate userids on my linux box. I think other folks with heterogeneous sites would like to do the same.

I installed phpwebsite yesterday and played with the themes and modules. Phpwebsite is a good low cost cms with a lot of functionality. I think it is particularly appealing to nonprofits and clubs. I will do a little more testing to determine if it is a good match for our Habitat affiliate. I believe the biggest problem is keeping the website up to date. A low cost cms might be the right solution.

I moved Sharepoint to the “data” drive yesterday. I found the instructions in a mailing list. I fumbled through the instructions but got it done. You gotta do what they tell you to do not what you think they meant. Oops!

The basic instructions are:

1. Stop the sharepoint website.
2. Go into OSQL and run a procedure to detach the database and config.
3. Copy the two databases and correspponding log files to the new location. Fix the NTFS permissions on the new directories.
4. Re-attach the databases and log files.
5. Start the website and test.

While I was in the SQL Server Enterprise manager I went ahead and ran the Database maintenance plan. I am not sure how you can promote Sharepoint without a Database maintenance plan. Hmm!

Today I got the VNC server to run the Fedora box. The biggest problem was getting the default desktop. For some reason I have to uncomment two lines in the xstartup file. They had a comment in the file telling you to do just that. You would have thought that would have been the default setup. Once again I am tunnelling it through ssh. I probably don't need to do but it is not very hard and a good practice.