Project ramp-up

Things are definitely starting to intensify at work. Currently I'm working on a new WebAuth release with enhanced SPNEGO (in general, Apache REMOTE_USER) support. Since I was in the code anyway, I'm going to clean up the documentation and some of the code for the weblogin scripts and really document the template parameters, which means that I think this next release is going to be 3.5.0 since template parameter names are going to change.

The target release date for something for internal testing is Wednesday. I hope to get a public release out Friday (and really should send out an announcement about the new web site and mailing lists before that -- and now I've written that down, so I'll remember to do it).

Then, I have a few weeks while that's being tested, during which I need to work on remctl and during which we'll be finalizing the work that we want to contract out for the Kerberos migration. Then, starting at the beginning of April, I expect both the Kerberos development and our new web developer to start at the same time, which means I'll be completely swamped with that work.

I'm starting to think that May may be better for my trip to Canada than April, just because it's becoming less and less clear whether I can get away in April at all. Rather a lot is going to be going on.

I'm hopeful but nervous about this Kerberos upgrade. Having it done is going to be fantastic, but there are a lot of steps still and a lot that can go wrong. But that's the reason why we're getting detailed migration plans and upgrade documentation before we start, and I think after I have all of that in my hands, this will look much better. And ideally we can provide a good enough test environment that the contractors can do some testing of the plan.

Then, after all that's done and I have a chance to catch my breath, more parts of the Kerberos project continue. Plus, I get to do a major upgrade of Stanford's Usenet servers and a significant rework of our account creation infrastructure.

Life is definitely not going to be boring.