The day Google broke email signatures...

We are having an interesting time (since yesterday morning) with email signature images in Gmail at the moment.

It's a minor thing, but it reflects poorly on an organisation's digital corporate image (and gets marketing people really hot under the collar).

Google seems to have changed something, somewhere about how signature images in Gmail work, at least for some users/organisations.

Apparently, this affects "a small number" of their clients, according to their tech support (presumably, they change a thing, roll it out to some of their clients and servers and see what happens... and we're in the guinea pig bunch this time).

What you see, if this affects you, is "broken image" icons in emails received by clients and in your own sent items (and existing email conversations) instead of your signature image.

Neither of the work-arounds their tech support suggested... worked.

But I seem to have figured out what *does* work...

Dear Apple. Please stop pretending you're the answer to all of our problems.

This post was prompted by a brief discussion with a teacher acquaintance of mine who has 300-odd iPads at their school, which they have to manage because their IT staff are too busy, and by my observations of the past year or so of iPads and IOS around here, and a lot of time "thinking" about BYOD/1:1. 

You know what irritates sysadmins more than almost anything else?

Vapourware.

What's almost even more annoying?

UsersWhen people with the power to force purchasing decisions (but who lack "tech clue") buy into it. This is a common problem throughout the IT world.

But this post is going to focus on the first of those inter-related problems, because it's one that's quite easy to fix in this example. If you're Apple.

Simplified 802.1x roll-out for windows clients: The JANET SU1X utility

I'm clearly not the first sysadmin to find setting up windows clients a pain; the UK university network consortium, JANET, has supported the development of a freely available setup utility, SU1X.

You can obtain the files through the JANET site, https://community.jisc.ac.uk/library/janet-services-documentation/su1x-8021x-configuration-deployment-tool or from GitHub on https://github.com/GarethAyres/SU1X (Edit: They seem to have moved it to SourceForge; see updated info)

Apple Cache Server update

In a previous post, we went through the steps I took to install a working Apple cache server.

It looks like our Apple cache server is earning its keep:

Look at all that nice, healthy, bandwidth-saving green!

FreeRADIUS - production SSL certificates

In the previous post, we covered the basic setup of FreeRADIUS.

In this post, we're going to focus on getting the SSL certificates right, and meet some of the common client snafus and their work-arounds (aka "hello Microsoft, please stop sucking at enterprise WiFi").

FreeRADIUS installation and configuration

I eventually abandoned shelved getting a working PacketFence installation (the learning curve and my time availability were not friends); I'll probably go back to setting that up (in the very least so there is a working config example), but I needed a production ready system, fast.

So, now that I've "simplified" to a working "just RADIUS" environment, I should be able to "complicate" it with PacketFence later on (and probably will do - electronic device registration deeply appeals to me on a "proper process" level, and helps with nonsense like RICA, although properly configured RADIUS logging might just obviate that need).

The stuff I learned pounding my head against PacketFence helped, but it wasn't the whole story...

Apple caching server

With the ever growing number of Apple devices [particularly iPads and iPhones] on our campus and (as far as I can see) no local Apple servers/CDN facility in the country, it makes a lot of sense for us to put in a cache.