Chris Malton's blog

Over these next few posts, I'll be sharing the secret of setting up LDAP, RADIUS and 802.1x, then putting the whole thing together, and finally authenticating users against an Active Directory domain.

This post covers setting up LDAP.

I'm using Debian 6 for my testing, so please bear that in mind if you aren't.
Also, every command will be shown with either a # or $ at the start. This is a reasonably standard convention indicating the type of prompt you should be at. # is a root prompt. $ is a user prompt.

It has been a very long time since I blogged here.

It's time to start again I think!

So, over the next few posts, I'm going to explain how to set up an LDAP server on Debian, including some rather ugly hacks for if you don't want to use dc=<dc1>,dc=<dc2> format (i.e. you're not running anything that's remotely DNS based). From there, I'm going to move on to the slightly mythological creature that is FreeRadius. FreeRadius is just one part of the puzzle. From there, I'm going to set up a fully capable 802.1x wireless network, which authenticates against LDAP.

In the first post of the summer, I'm going to reveal a few interesting features that exist in jQuery and jQueryUI, which I've been using quite extensively recently.

The first of these features is jQueryUI's dialogs and the "position" attribute.

The jQueryUI docs say:

So, everybody loves Internet Explorer, right?

Not so if your a web developer. Internet Explorer 8 (which would like to try and pretend it can pass Acid3 with just 20/100) in its infinate wisdom, decides to follow your instructions to the letter.

Firefox, on the other hand, sees your instructions and does a bit of LaTEX-style processing on them, and declares "I know best about (whatever)".

I had exams, and they stopped me blogging. No, really, they were not easy, and it's not A-level style papers all over again. Other a few mishaps, which I will skip over for the sake of not going into a rant, I'm pretty confident I at least passed the exams. So that was two weeks of the past three.

As usual, last Thursday I headed down to the Stag's Head on Campus for Karaoke.

Mark (our DJ) was already there with John from Entz and I decided to give them a hand (I always have done, and it's good fun). Mark told me he'd bought some new discs for the system. The next question was how to import them.

I can't believe it - I'm here again, just a couple of days til Christmas 2009. It's a been a bit of a whirlwind year, what with A-levels and uni and work.

In no particular order, here's a few highlights of my year.

1) The discovery of Scenario paintball. The guys over at UKScenario have made me welcome. Hats off to woodyudet, and the rest of Kent Rangers for making me feel so welcome at my first game, and the rest of the forum for putting up with my sarcastic questions etc.

The ZyXEL P660-HW router has a nice feature that allows you to turn on NAT loopback. I want this to always be on! The default is off on a reboot.

Enter "sys edit" a primitive editor living under Menu 24, submenu 8 of the telnet admin interface.

Log in, drop to a command shell and type

sys edit autoexec.net

Keep hitting N(ext) until you see "EOF" appear. You've found the line to insert after.

Three weeks in, and it's time to scribble a few more thoughts. I've just got back into my room in halls from doing everyone's washing up, while they've all gone away for the weekend. Just Dan, one of my flatmates, and myself this weekend - everyone else has cleared off to various places. Home, London, or even Majorca.

Here's the second part of my first week at Soton.

Wacky Wednesday

Wednesday was what is named "the Bunfight". Nobody is quite sure why it has that name, but it involves nearly every club in the uni getting under one (or two) roof(s) to try and recruit members. So let's just say I've got a fair list I've joined: