SmartThinking || March to June 2017 Newsletter

Message from Wade

Oh my, how did Canada day get here so quickly? I had the March newsletter all ready to send and I was just waiting on some pictures and now it’s almost Canada Day. So what can we learn from this? Clearly, I am good at managing computer systems, but managing communications on a schedule – not so much. Verne Harnish, who has a great book on “Scaling Up,” talks about this in great detail. Focus on what you do well and for the rest of the stuff get people that are good at those things and let them focus on getting those tasks done.

I am not sure why I tend to forget that all the time, but it couldn’t be more true.  If you are great at managing projects, development, administration, day to day operations or something other than technical managed services and you are doing technical managed services duties – maybe it’s time to get somebody that can do technical managed services for you?!

Linux X11 Forwarding with SU Switch User

Over the years access is often granted to one of the administrative users and then once we are on the server we have to switch user to another account to do the technical services work. This creates a problem with X11 Forwarding and so this is one work around to the problem. X authentication is based on cookies. So the secondary account needs to have access to the same cookies as the original login user.

Here is a nice easy way to do this.  This was done on an AIX 7.1 server:

Before you issue the su or sudo, request the xauth cookies and look for the current DISPLAY that’s connecting to your X server:

$ xauth list
You’ll get something like

somehost.somedomain:10 mit-magic-cookie-1 4d22408a71a55b41ccd1657d377923ae

Then, execute a switch user (su) and add the cookie to that user:

$ xauth add somehost.somedomain:10 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 4d22408a71a55b41ccd1657d377923ae

(just copy’n-paste the output of the above ‘xauth list’ onto ‘xauth add’) That’s it. Now, you _should_ be able to start any X application.

Panda + Community March to June 2017

Curling, Bowling, Dancing, Conferences, Running, Biking, Cooking, Field Trips, the question may be what haven’t we done over the past couple of months.

This July will find the Panda out Riding to End MS again for the 3rd time with Team Butt Ugly. We have almost 50 riders on the team and we are on a mission to be at the top of the fundraising board this year. Please Support The Ride! I plan to get some video blogs out soon so keep an eye for that. However, any support you can offer is greatly appreciated.

As for March to June well, we went out and Curled for Kids with Big Brothers, then we helped out at the Big Brothers annual BBQ cooking up hundreds of hotdogs and sausages, and then turned around and Bowled for Kids. Big Brothers Big Sisters is a fantastic organization and we are thrilled to be associated with them, because we believe that everybody should have a mentor in their life, personally or professionally or both. Mentors make a huge difference. The Smart Panda has many mentors and literally all the success that we have had has come through their advice, experience, and motivation. To each and every one of them, we tip our hat!

In Rotary we have been busy as well, as we formed a group in the club to “officially” run more, so I believe we are 12 members strong now and we run regularly, and just last week we did a run to Port Stanley in which the short run distance was 5km and the top runners clocked 18kms. I was able to gut out 8, but it was just awesome to be part of the group. On the Rotary side, I have gone and got trained to be President for the 2016-2017 year, we have planned and now we get to execute starting next week. Combine that with the District 6330 conference which had almost 400 Rotarians, saw some fantastic speakers, and engaged people from 5 to 95 learning and even dancing (to the YMCA) and even topped off with a well choreographed Viennese waltz (Done by our Rotary Dance Club).  Early this month a group of us from the Club went to Atlanta for the Rotary International Conference in which 40,000+ Rotarians showed up.  Talk about impressive. However, they really did a good job in focussing on a really serious issue with “Human Trafficking”. I don’t think that is a best term for it, because this is a very serious topic and if you think it doesn’t exist or it doesn’t affect you – YOU’D BE WRONG. I am really excited to help lead our club in some new projects to help to try to scratch the surface of this issue.

Check back next month for pictures from the MS Ride – Grandbend to London (Donate NOW)! Till next month……