August 13th, 2007 by shashi

Continuing our triumphs and tribulations with Zimbra, sometimes we encounter issues that defy the general rules of the game. In many such cases, we’ve found solutions on blogs or the zimbra forum.

But here’s one issue that I couldn’t find anywhere on the net. It might help you if you are running zimbra and encounter this issue

When clients try to send emails through Zimbra (SMTP Relay) using SMTP Authentication, the authentication used to fail though the webmail (Zimbra’s own as well as Squirrelmail and even POP/IMAP ) worked. Poking at the logs showed:

Aug 14 07:44:07 localhost saslauthd[26944]: auth_zimbra: vendor.informedia auth failed: cur
l_easy_perform: error(28): Connection time-out
Aug 14 07:44:07 localhost saslauthd[26944]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=vendor.in
formedia] [service=smtp] [realm=] [mech=zimbra] [reason=Unknown]
Aug 14 07:44:07 localhost postfix/smtpd[19245]: warning: unknown[122.167.6.251]: SASL LOGIN
authentication failed

Running saslauthd in the debug mode was not a big help either. Zimbra uses soap and a specific authentication mechanism (called zimbra) for sending the credential info and interfacing with saslauthd and the webservice. IOW, tomcat (the SOAP provider) should be getting requests. But looking at the tomcat logs showed up no such requests. Trying the URL manually, from my laptop I was able to connect to the URL. No use, still.

But trying to connect to the URL using lynx on the server itself pointed out that the response time was large. It was taking up so much time to resolve the host (local hostname) that saslauthd used to time out.

Ahh!! The solution was now so simple. Install a local caching DNS server and try out the name resolution a couple of times. That does it. It did!! The whole thing’s working like a charm, ever since

Also, while at it, I discovered a cool tool for testing out SMTP issues. No more setting up accounts on Balsa/Evolution.

shashi@anacoluthon:~$ apt-cache show swaks
Package: swaks
…
Description: SMTP command-line test tool
swaks (Swiss Army Knife SMTP) is a command-line tool written in Perl
for testing SMTP setups; it supports STARTTLS and SMTP AUTH (PLAIN,
LOGIN, CRAM-MD5, SPA, and DIGEST-MD5). swaks allows to stop the SMTP
dialog at any stage, e.g to check RCPT TO: without actually sending a
mail.
.
If you are spending too much time iterating “telnet foo.example 25″
swaks is for you.
.
Homepage: http://www.jetmore.org/john/code/#swaks

Now, on to the next task …

June 19th, 2007 by shashi

Though technically not a startup, we’ve been in a startup mode from quite sometime – say seven years. Oops! In seven years, history gets changed by companies younger than that. So, what does it take to build a startup and be successful while at it ?

Marc Andreessen has addressed some points in his blog, in which he points out the reasons not to build startups!! He hits the nail right on the head with each and every letter in that post. Ouch! That hurts!! Let me try to correlate.

Why do we start up in the first place ?

• the opportunity to be in control of your own destiny
• The opportunity to create something new
• The opportunity to have an impact on the world
• create your ideal culture and work with a dream team of people
• money

The Opportunity to do. The Freedom to explore the Opportunities. The Opportunity to be Free. When compared to an engineering or an executive job, where you are one of the minions working to realise somebody else’s ideas and opportunities, working for your own place under the sun is a very delicious idea. The freedom this portends, counters all the comforts that a cushy job can provide.

We’ve had numerous opportunities to explore over the years. Several ecsastic moments, several downfalls. The one big difference is that we didn’t build to scale. We worked on the by now classical form of outsourced services. Having a replicable or assembly line model of products or services is going to make a big difference to the growth potential. We didn’t do that!

Where can it go wrong ?

First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

And what a rollercoaster!!! It ain’t like nothing that can be experienced elsewhere. Further

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Know what??!! It need not be a day, even hours! minutes!! seconds!!! A positive side effect is going to be that you’ll become a lot wiser, philosophical and equanimous. Of course, you need to have solid backing from your near and dear ones. And you need to have an outlet for your emotions without which you might end up in extremities. Like my friend, who killed himself a couple of weeks back

In an established company — no matter how poorly run or demoralized — things happen. They just happen. People come in to work. Code gets written. User interfaces get designed. Servers get provisioned. Markets get analyzed. Pricing gets studied and determined. Sales calls get made. The wastebaskets get emptied. And so on.

Sigh! Those aren’t something one person can do – day in and day out. Why didn’t somebody tell me before ?

In a startup it is very easy for the code to not get written, for the user interfaces to not get designed… for people to not come into work… and for the wastebaskets to not get emptied.

You as the founder have to put all of these systems and routines and habits in place and get everyone actually rowing — forget even about rowing in the right direction: just rowing at all is hard enough at the start.

And until you do, absolutely nothing happens.

Unless, of course, you do it yourself.

Have fun emptying those wastebaskets.

Thanks! Why am I pasting entire paragraphs here ? Because these are the exact thoughts I’ve been trying to put into words. Marc has articulated them so well. About the wastebaskets, “been there, done that!“.

By that I mean that half or more of the people you hire aren’t going to work out. They’re going to be too lazy, too slow, easily rattled, political, bipolar, or psychotic.

Here, I’ve had quite a pleasant experience so far. Unless they are influenced by various factors, they do try hard, very hard to contribute. But, the issue remains that with all the paucity of resources, how is a startup going to manage it’s people ? This according to me is the most complex challenge in the mix.

Fifth, God help you, at some point you’re going to have to hire executives.

At what point do you hire executives ? And how do you compensate them ? Executives aren’t cheap! They need to have a sense of belonging, if they’re going to put in the effort. How do you address their hierarchy or position in the management ? What are the established roles in startups ? How do you shed your ego in order to work with someone with a more or less equal ego ?

Tough questions. If you’ve the answers, half the battle is won. The other half starts now.

Sixth, the hours
…
And even if you can help your employees have proper work/life balance, as a founder you certainly won’t.

Stress. Strain. Pressure. And to think of it, I didn’t think much of them even in my Engineering Mechanics classes. Maybe I’d flunked. Oh! wait :-p

It takes time for the culture of any company to become “set” — for the team of people who have come together for the first time to decide collectively what they’re all about, what they value — and how they look at challenge and adversity.

In the best case, you get an amazing dynamic of people really pulling together, supporting one another, and working their collective tails off in pursuit of a dream.

In the worst case, you end up with widespread, self-reinforcing bitterness, disillusionment, cynicism, bad morale, contempt for management, and depression.

And you as the founder have much less influence over this than you’ll think you do.

And by the time, a team settles. It’s time for a new team to move in. Due to unlimited opportunities and these pressures, people move on. The camaraderie breaks. The work suffers. Customers get impatient

Eighth, there are lots of X factors that can come along and whup you right upside the head, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about them.

Like our scheduled and unscheduled power cuts, lack of internet access, etc.

But, at the end of the day the thrill of coordinating all the activities, putting on various thinking hats, talking to people and getting things done is the bottom line for us – the founders/managers.

June 16th, 2007 by shashi

Inspired by Mark Shuttleworth‘s latest post

A friend of mine is pretty tech savvy and also very organised. He backs up all his files once a month, copied it to floppies earlier, onto CDs later and now to DVDs. He carefully catalogs those disks and stores it away. Who knows, what might be required at a later day!!

He has in his collection all the documents, he’s created over the years using a variety of tools – majorly Microsoft Office. He even has .doc documents that were created using Microsoft Word 3.0. And a lot of other spreadsheets (.xls) amongst others.

As any other tech savvy guy, he likes to keep his software always up-to-date. He has spent a fortune over the years on the Microsoft operating systems – DOS, Win 3.1, 95, 98, ME(!!), XP and now Vista !!! He has also bought all the Office versions right from the 3.0 days.

A great model customer for Microsoft. Nice! But so far, he hadn’t had any use for his disks. He didn’t want any of his documents from previous years. But, like any other intelligent investor, he still bought his insurance – made backups regularly.

Recently he’d upgraded his operating system from Microsoft Windows XP to Microsoft Windows Vista, and office from Microsoft Office XP to Microsoft Office 2007. As always, he muttered some profanities about absence of any compelling feature and that the program was stagnant from years now. Fine! He was ok with that.

Until last week! He was queried to provide a letter he’d sent to his customer some years back, in which he’d detailed the technical aspects of a work he’d done for them. They were happy with his work then and were looking for his services yet again. They wanted the letter to recommend him for the work, but had lost the letter and asked him for a copy of the same.

My much-organised-friend was more than happy, he looked up his catalogue – that he kept printed and filed away (:-P), checked out the disk which had the letter and popped it into his computer. The letter was typed using MS Word 95. But, it’s all .doc right ? Yeah! Now the fun started. He opened the letter in his latest spiffy Office 2007.

It opened and what did he see ? Garbled text!!!!!!! He was shocked. He thought the disk was damaged. But it was a CDROM, well maintained and he could open the other files – .PDF, .TXT, .JPG, everything else without any problem. Hmmm! After some googling, he found out it was some unexplained problem that occurred with newer versions of MS Office. He also found out, this version of MS Office would not help him solve his problem.

He had a brainwave. He still had his copy of the Original MS Office 95 (TM) lying around. Why not install it and get it open it up. It’ll take only a couple of minutes to do that right ? Wrong! He popped in the CD, clicked on Setup. It spewed out lots of complaints and aborted the installation. Huh!! He was stuck. I gave him a suggestion that he install his older copy of Windows 98 and try to install Office 95 on that . He was horrified by the idea. How could he replace his latest Vista with some old buggy OS !!! And he would have to reinstall and redo all his customisations if he had to reinstall

It was then, I asked him to install Open Office 2.0. He said, he didn’t have the license. I said, I had the license and an unlimited license at that I downloaded the latest build for Windows, installed and there it was. His letter opened perfectly well, which he took a printout and sent it across.

All’s well that ends well !! Not quite. This is not the end of the story. Proprietary formats like Microsoft’s .doc, .xls lock up documents [ಕನ್ನಡ]. Our documents. Our pieces of work. Our data.

So, for this reason a bunch of guys(!!) got together and came up with a standard specification – Open Document Format (ODF). This specification has been implemented in tools like OpenOffice, StarOffice, Abiword and is being adopted internally by several corporates and by several Governments the world over. And as usual, Microsoft wouldn’t agree. It came up with it’s own “Open” format specification, which can at best be described as an “open” container for it’s binary formulations.

Microsoft says, they have evolved the .doc format to such a level, now it can support all kind of media, supports versioning, is tied with several tools (Example), and hence the new .docx format should be the standard. Huh! People who are in the know have certain observations, which isn’t necessarily nice for Microsoft. Microsoft says, they’ll provide converters(!!) for various formats. I would rather write my own.

The advantages with Simple, Open and Featureful specifications such as ODF are that, it gives rise to several opportunities without having to depend upon it’s creator. And the best part is that these formats are always open.

My data should remain mine alone, not some blood hound corporation’s.

June 14th, 2007 by shashi

In unix, fortune has been around from a long time and it’s as popular and a favourite now, as it was way back in time.

Some nuggets:

Don’t worry so loud, your roommate can’t think.
—-
You will wish you hadn’t.
—-
Don’t tell any big lies today. Small ones can be just as effective.
—-
You’ve been leading a dog’s life. Stay off the furniture.
—-
You will experience a strong urge to do good; but it will pass.
—-
Be free and open and breezy! Enjoy! Things won’t get any better so
get used to it.
—-
You are a very redundant person, that’s what kind of person you are.
—-

Finally,

$ fortune
You have literary talent that you should take pains to develop.

How true

June 12th, 2007 by shashi

Our honorable Prime Minister has called upon our corporate honchos to cut on their drawings and increase their commitment towards social responsibility. As several writers have already talked about it already, that’s a very timely suggestion and it’s about time too. Or is it ?

Indian corporates have always been humble over the years. They’ve also have had some ideas of social responsibility. But, nevertheless the government has been totally distrustful of the private sector and have taken it upon themselves to better the lot of the people.

Of course, there are several interpretations as how to improve the common man. But the government almost always has botched up every opportunity, except for only a few instances. Our Prime Minister realised this two decades back, and started involving the people (private) in the business of running the country. Unfortunately, some took it too seriously, some didn’t and many others celebrated the return of cerebral politics.

This too was short lived. The government created partners in the form of middlemen, brokers, allowed every rule in the book become redundant and promoted the greatest aristocratic enterprises (read property dealers and cos). The government, in all it’s wisdom procures land and allows the industry to do whatever they want, on the land. Even setup entertainment centers, recreation places (ok! it’s needed. but on fertile farmland ?)

As the prime minister says “But unless the governance of the economy is improved, even further liberalization – which is sorely needed – will be insufficient to sustain growth“. How is the governance going to improve ? Move it to the e-sphere ? eGovernance ? And how to adopt eGovernance ?
Just having a look at a concept papers and working papers from the government’s standardization website – http://egovstandards.gov.in/ gives other ideas. Most of the papers speak at a very high level, just cite academic theories.

“The world has enough to meet everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed” – M.K.Gandhiji