Wednesday, 21 December 2016

Ah, wonderful health hazards

I can't tell what has been overall worse for my health in the past few weeks. The bathroom connected to my home office directly sits over the complex's "laundromat station". This did not used to bother me. In fact, I was quite okay with this, because it means I have the closest walking distance of any of my neighbours to it. However, for the past two or three weeks, I can smell — from the office, mind — a very strong odour of laundry detergent every time someone does a load. Turns out a lot of people do loads in the 18:00 to 21:00 time slot on weekdays, which happens to be when I am at my most productive in my office. I cannot imagine this is at all healthy for me.

But then I remember I've spent every day since Saturday spending multiple hours trying to set up OpenLDAP for new project. I've always just used Active Directory on the server-side, so my only experience thus far with OpenLDAP has been client-side. It's a great client library with easy configuration and a great debug mode that will tell you exactly what is happening and what is going wrong. Unfortunately, the server part, at least on Debian, uses "dynamic configuration" which means everything is in LDAP.

Now, look, LDIF and LDAP are fine and great for phone book-style records. It makes perfect sense. That is what it was designed to do. Storing regexp in ASN.1 BER is pushing it. But the way they do HDB/MDB grouping feels to me like trying to fit in with all those cool kids with their NoSQL and their MapReduce and their terrible terribly-great performance by using "shards" everywhere. And our leader wants replication so that it's fault tolerant. Now I get to convert decades-old documentation about an "enterprise" feature to this "dynamic configuration" thing. I cannot imagine this is at all healthy for me.

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