Pete Ryland's Web Log

Powers of 2 and the New Job [] (01:08)

Hmm.. well, nothing to do with XOR at all. I should have realised sooner, and it's still a nice but thoroughly unobvious trick, but x & (x-1) does the job nicely.

Anyway, I've been happily working for the last three weeks for a wholly-owned subsidiary of Banque Société Générale called Squaregain but soon to be united with Selftrade after both were bought by Boursorama. This makes us the second-biggest retail trading player in the UK. Anyway, the people are great, the commute is nice - they're Docklands-based (about 2 miles away) - and the work is good. I've been getting my teeth into an updating of the web servers at the moment. They've been running Websphere on AIX and my first main project is to get us using apache and tomcat on Linux on Power5. I've set this up nicely now with separate tomcat processes for each brand and apache doing the SSL. Extracting the SSL keys and certificates from IBM's tools and converting them to PEM format proved quite a fun learning experience. Other than that, it's been pretty straight forward, writing lots of scripts and infrastructure stuff to automatically configure a server from scratch and deploy all the latest webapp builds. And last week, I got to test it all out by rebuilding the UAT machine which went very smoothly. It went about half and hour past my window because of a few issues regarding the network cards and the webapp configuration but all in all I was quite pleased.

There is only actually one tiny thing I don't like about the new job though, and that is the proxy server. At Create I got very used to having a direct connection to the Internet, one of the rare benefits that Unix Admins usually take for granted and one of the reasons I prefer it to development work (the other reasons I'll leave to another day). At Squaregain, however, the department's internal infrastructure is run by IT Support next door, and not by us; we only look after the external-facing infrastructure. Anyway, I think this is actually the first time I've worked somewhere that uses a Microsoft solution for most of the internal infrastructure and certainly the first place that has enforced on me the use of an ISA Proxy Server. Now I've heard of these before, and nothing good. I thought people were just whinging about being behind a proxy server at all, but seriously, this thing has some horrible bugs. Firstly, it requires NTLM authentication, which in itself isn't a huge problem, but if you have applications that first try basic authentication it will actually accept the request, then hang for about 5 minutes before finally passing on the data. It would be preferable not to accept the request in the first place rather than keep the user waiting, as the application will then hopefully get an NTLM authentication request back. To make matters worse, when downloading files with it, instead of passing on the data as it comes, it actually waits for the whole file to be downloaded before passing any of it on. Fortunately we have a fast connection so this is not that noticable. But really, this product really stands out as one of the shoddiest pieces of software I've ever had to use. Ok, rant over. Sorry. And "Yay" for ntlmaps! >