Category: Technology

  • ibiblio needs a student Linux admin

    [Image no longer available]

    ibiblio is looking for a student Linux admin and general tech wonk. We need someone who enjoys working with Linux, wants to be part of innovative technology projects, and isn’t afraid to fail, learn, and get better.

    Things you’ll find in our environment include:

    • Completely virtualized server infrastructure
    • All Linux, all the time
    • An automate everything approach. We make extensive use of puppet, monit, and cron.
    • Lots of Web sites, some that get a few million page views per day (yes, that’s a lot).
    • Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, varnish, lighttpd, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
    • One of the largest generators of network traffic on the UNC campus. We transfer about 4 TB per day.

    We’re also developing a new platform to publish large files, between 1 GB and 1 TB in size. It uses BitTorrent. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.

    We’ll pay you, of course. The position is open to full and part time UNC students, either graduate or undergraduate. Work schedule is flexible, but 10-20 hours per week is typical.

    If you’re interested, send a note and/or resume to jobs-at-ibiblio-dot-org.

    * photograph by dronir

  • WordPress Multisite (using subdomains) + Shibboleth authentication

    The WordPress Shibboleth plugin advertises WPMU support but does not seem to work with a WP 3.x Multisite/Network installation. Below is a patch to version 1.4 of the Shibboleth plugin and basic setup details needed to support sitewide Shibboleth authentication.

    Before we begin, I assume you’re already familiar with installing and configuring Shibboleth, WordPress, and the WordPress Shibboleth plugin. If you haven’t already set up WordPress or a Shibboleth SP, either bribe someone who has or find a carafe of coffee and come back in a day or two.

    Download the patch (wp-shibboleth-1.4-multisite.patch.zip)

    What’s in the patch?

    • Support for WP Multisite/Network with subdomains. I didn’t try this with a subdirectory implementation and don’t expect it to work.
    • A setting to specify the common email domain for users’ email addresses as a combination of their shibboleth username + “@” + the common email domain
    • Fixes for localization/gettext support.
    • HTML markup fixes on the admin control panel page

    (more…)

  • ibiblio celebrates 2011 World IPv6 day

    ibiblio is happy to participate in 2011 World IPv6 day. A small but diverse set of content is now accessible via IPv6. You can view the ibiblio homepage, listen to live radio streams, or sync your local Fedora Linux mirror with rsync over IPv6. The ibiblio IPv6 services page has details on how to connect.

    Adoption of IPv6 has been very slow. The Internet Society lists only 434 registered 2011 World IPv6 day participants. However, events such as this give us an opportunity to explore and learn. Read on if you’re interested in some of the hurdles we encountered setting up IPv6 services.
    (more…)