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Pegasus Librarian Posts

Stranded by Single Sign On

Published by Iris on Friday, September 7th, 2007

I’m in the midst of a mini-crisis at the moment. I woke up thinking about it, which is why I’m here, typing away, long before my alarm would normally wake me up. The crisis is, I can’t log in to any of my work accounts. Not my email, the library’s proxy server, an internal library staff blog… nothing.

I noticed this at about 8:00 last night and sent an email to the IT help desk on campus (using my gmail account because, remember, no work email for me). A really helpful IT guy emailed me back saying he’d unlocked my account (note that this is well beyond normal working hours for the poor guy). I tried logging in, but nothing happened. This cycle repeated itself several times between 8 and 10:30-ish, all to no avail.

As far as we can figure it, the problem is Zimbra calendar’s iCal feed. Apparently, the feed needs to authenticate against the LDAP server, or something, and right now any feeds I have from my Zimbra calendar to anything else are trying and trying to authenticate using my old password (I had to change mine on Tuesday). The feeds try and try and fail and fail, and then they lock my account. Unfortunately, even after I killed my iCal feed to Google Calendar*, my account was still locking up. Now I’m sitting here wracking my brains and trying to think if there are any other feeds out there.

If this is the problem, and that’s still a big “if” at the moment, then people on campus are in big trouble. [See update below. It turned out not to be the iCal feed.] In Zimbra, if you want to share a calendar, your iCal feed is prominently displayed among the sharing options. And in the Zimbra training we received, we were all told that this was our iCal feed and that Mac people could continue to use their iCal programs. One of my co-workers even has his feed displayed on his web site for anyone else to import into their iCal-compatible systems. And if feeds have to be killed and regenerated every time we change our passwords (every 3 months), we’re in major, major trouble. Because, you see, nobody is used to the idea of a feed not being shareable, especially when the feed is included in the “share your calendar” dialog box. But the way this seems to be set up, if you share your calendar and then change your password, you’re hosed.

So here I am, frustrated and worried that I’ll have to go through the day with no access to any of my normal work tools, including the network drives that house a bunch of the projects I need to work on. All this on the last day before classes start. I could just about scream … or cry. Instead I’ll sit here, stare at my computer screen, and will my account to unlock itself. That should help.

[Updated to add: As it turns out, it wasn’t the iCal feed after all. What a relief! Instead it was a forgotton copy of Zimbra Desktop. I’d installed Desktop version, never used it, and forgotten about it. But unbeknownst to me it kept merrily syncing itself up with the server using my old password. Thankfully, everything is back to normal now.]

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*I feed my calendar to Google Calendar so that I can see when I’m busy and fill in the spaces where I’m not busy with my “availability calendar,” when then gets fed to my public schedule page. It’s a terrible workaround stemming from Zimbra’s inability to publish to an HTML page. Until everyone on campus has migrated to Zimbra, though, we need a way to publish our availability. And even after everyone is on Zimbra, sometimes it’s easier to just scan a week or two rather than set up an appointment, invite me, see if I’m free, and then click “next day” over and over looking for a time that works well for everyone. Because of this, we’d decided to maintain our published Google Calendars.

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The Day that Lasted a Year

Published by Iris on Thursday, September 6th, 2007

Today was one of those days that defies the laws of time and space, but in a bad way. From the moment I got out of bed until now, everything’s been a struggle. Reference schedule headaches, uncomfortably close brushes with confrontation, a group of students who hadn’t read the common reading book but who needed to discuss it with me for an hour, mass emails to all my faculty (9 separate emails for 9 separate departments), long and complicated reference questions during the 2 hours when I volunteered to cover the desk while nobody else could, and 6 or 7 other mini-crises marked my day and stretched it long beyond it’s normal hours. And through it all, Twitter was down. I mean really… I’m several straws past a broken back.

So now I’m sitting on my couch, in my PJs, aimlessly poking the internet, and watching my sister cook for me. Seriously, if my sister weren’t here I think I’d have skipped the whole dinner thing. Too much effort. But luckily, she’s here, and she was also up for ice cream before dinner… which is helping. Now I just need to survive tomorrow and then I can use the weekend to catch up on all the things I couldn’t get to today. *Sigh*

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I Could Quit Any Time

Published by Iris on Thursday, September 6th, 2007

I’m sitting here staring at a screen full of stylized puffy blue clouds and a text box which reads,

“Twitter is being upgraded! It’ll have super strength and agility when it wakes up. Hang tight!”

And so I hang tight…. hitting refresh every third second or so, just in case.

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The Week Before Classes

Published by Iris on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007

Classes start next Monday, and man oh man am I in denial. Whew! I even have sessions to teach next week, and am only prepared enough to have them listed in my calendar. And here’s why (other than my general denial, of course): requests always come in just about the time I start getting swamped with pre-term-insanely-busy-ness. My calendar was three of the four work days this week with orientation sessions, planning sessions, and meetings. Also, all of the publicity projects I had going on were absolutely positively DUE today. The brochures I’ve been creating were to be handed out today, the poster needs to be hung, and I still need to send out that fall “I’m here, remember me” email to each faculty member in my departments. No idea when that’ll happen.

So basically I started the day in panic mode… and with an hour and a half of all-library meeting. I was not in the mood! Did they know we had things to do!!! Still, I survived, and even learned a few things.

Luckily, though, the new faculty orientation session went really well. I was pretty worried about it. I mean, four academic technologists and 6 librarians in a room trying to convey all the helpfulness in the world to 40 or so overwhelmed and exhausted new faculty members is a stretch under the best circumstances. On top of it all, I didn’t feel like we’d done enough to prepare the session. We had a very, very basic sketch of what we wanted to accomplish, but I prefer more than that when presenting with so many people. And yet, with all this going against us the new faculty members seemed to appreciate the session, and I had good conversations with a couple of people who will be entering my departments. (I’m a little bit petrified of some of their research areas… but I’ll figure something out. I mean, I kind of have to. It’s my job. And I know from prior experience that these challenges are the most rewarding…once they’re overcome.)

Anyway, this session somehow brought it all home to me that the term is really starting. There’s no turning back. But it did more than that. It reminded me that however much I dread the constant panic of the term, this really is what my job is all about, and I love it. That slightly queasy, there’s-no-way-on-EARTH-I’ll-be-able-to-answer-that, hot-and-cold feeling that washes over me as impossible questions float my way is not the point. The point isn’t even the “thrill of the hunt.” That hunt can be more frustrating than thrilling a lot of the time, let me tell you. The point is exactly what one new professor said today on her way out of the session: “I feel so … covered… like there’s this great safety net under me.” That’s the point.

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