Reservations – 2

 Read in a blog that with 69% reservations for SC/STs, BCs, MBCs and the 21% Open Category Tamil Nadu professional course admision cutoffs have come closer together. For example for a course the cutoffs could be

OC – 99.3%

BC – 98%

MBC – 93%

SC/ST – 65% 

We are not looking at dilution of merit to a great extent. In the beginning it was a bit low, as the years rolled more students aspired and tried to break in and the cut offs went up.  

Upgrading from Red Hat 8.0 to Fedora Core 1

We upgraded the installation of RH 8.0 to FC1 in our online server using the upgrade option of the installer.

When the new system is plugged in, dns server was not responding. There was an issue with the permission to /etc/bind directory. Once changed it to give write permission to bind things worked.

Sendmail was tougher. Sendmail smtp authentication did not work at all. Tried so many things. Finally it turned out that I should have read the release notes to figure out what changed from RH 8.0 to FC 1.

QUOTE From the Release Notes 

 The openldap, postfix, and sendmail packages are now compiled using version 2 of the Cyrus SASL library. For these packages, the default location of each application's SASL configuration files has changed from /usr/lib/sasl to /usr/lib/sasl2. In addition, some SASL configuration options have changed; refer to /usr/share/doc/cyrus-sasl*/options.html for a list of options recognized by version 2 of the Cyrus SASL library.
Configuration files that specified a pwcheck_method of sasldb must be changed to specify auxprop, the auxprop_plugin setting must be set to sasldb, and the contents of /etc/sasldb must be migrated into /etc/sasldb2 using the dbconverter-2 tool.
Configurations that set pwcheck_method to other values must be set to saslauthd, and the saslauthd service must be enabled and started.
Refer to /usr/share/doc/cyrus-sasl*/upgrading.html for more information.

UNQUOTE

In addition I also did the following:

a. Used this page  to test the smtp auth working. Especially the telnet session to test the settings is useful:

  You can also try to test it manually. Here is a dialog from my system (properly garbled for security reasons). The green text is what you would type. The blue text is what the server displays.

> telnet localhost 25
EHLO localhost
AUTH LOGIN
a4msl9ux
ZvVx9G1hcg==
MAIL FROM: me@something.fake
RCPT TO: you@nowhere.land
DATA
This is a test .
QUIT
The line a4msl9ux is a user name encoded in Base64. Likewise, the line ZvVx9G1hcg== is the password to that account also encoded in Base64. 

b.  Downloaded sasl certificates following procedures outlined here. 

c. Added a sasl password to the user

saslpasswd username

passwd username 

d.  Change sendmail.mc file to allow collections from all hosts (not only localhost) and also allow plain/login authentication methods. Use this file to create sendmail.cf as m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf

e. On the client use TLS, PLAIN authentical method to send mail.  

Religion and Politics – 2

Religion is a private, personal affair. In the name of religion when a group is formed, politics starts there. Ranging from the Catholican church to the Jamaat's of muslims to RSS shakhas, organized religions do more harm than good.