News from PANUG/BizNix - June 6, 2002
http://panug.org - http://biznix.org

"There are 10 kinds of people in this world.  
Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

Germany announced yesterday that their federal, state and local government
offices will run IBM eServer hardware running SuSE Linux.

Mozilla 1.0 is Official. About two hours ago, Mozilla 1.0 was released to
the general populace. The Mozilla developers have been toiling for almost
three years on the project, and more than one industry pundit expressed
doubt the browser would clear the beta stage, never mind present any kind of
challenge to IE's market dominance. 


PLUMBING 101
by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers

A few weeks ago, the software that sends out these email broadcasts
was being worked on to accomodate the fact that we now have mirrored
sites. Either site can fail and you'll still reach the PANUG or
BizNix web sites and email. The problem was that our mailing list
software was not designed to work in a mirrored environment. A
temporary setup to allow that day's broadcast to go out allowed
someone to send a v_i_r_u_s-infected message to the entire list.

I'm responsible for the software and this convinced me to divorce
the software that sends the broadcasts from the software that receives
mail. I wanted no possibility for received mail to cause mail to be
sent to the PANUG/BizNix list. Simplicity and security were my most
important goals. This article details how this was achieved.

The core piece of software is the Mail::Bulkmail Perl module. This
takes care of the actual sending of mail to the list. You just point
to a flat file that has the list (one email address per line), a
file that contains the mail content, and supply a Subject: line. It
does the rest. Everything else that needs to be done to build a workable
system for sending email broadcasts is just plumbing.

The software is FAST. The bulk of all email is delivered in under
one minute. Stragglers are the result of (your) DNS problems and
(your) busy mail servers. Since the software is based on Perl, it
can run on any platform. I, of course, use Linux but it could work
on Windows or NetWare as well. This is the benefit of using software
that's not tied to a single platform.

Good system administrators try to automate their tasks so they're
not obstacles to getting things done. So, I configured the system
to automatically do a broadcast whenever a message file was placed
in a certain directory. The message is automatically archived and
removed from the directory after the broadcast. This automation is
easily achieved with a Linux cron job. Newer versions of Windows
have scheduling features as well. Since we have mirrored sites,
either server can do the broadcast.

Maintenance of the mailing list is currently handled manually but
will be handled by a web page in the future. Since simplicity is
a goal, I'll not attempt to make that software "smart" and, for
example, check to see whether someone is already subscribed.
Remember, we have mirrored sites which would make foolproof operation
difficult (and impossible if a WAN link fails). Both sites will
update their own list with a periodic synchronization between the
two that sorts the list and weeds out duplicates.

This project is rather simple. The major piece of code was already
available (for free) and I just engineered the plumbing around it.
I find that it takes far less time to engineer my own solutions
with common tools (perl, cron, shell scripts, etc.) than to search
for canned software that comes close to what I want to do but
ultimately forces me to settle for functionality and operation
that is not ideal for my purposes.

ACCESSIBILITY
by Dick Pilz

Section 508 covers much, much more than Web documents. One of the core
tasks for the QA group that I am in at Symantec is testing and
certifying Ghost software to comply with Section 508. It only applies
to windowing/mousing systems - character-based systems have no problem.

There are several excellent "508" sites you can Google to. One thing
that you can try is to use a screen reader to navigate your pages.
(XP has a mediocre reader and there are lots of shareware ones.) Make
sure that all parts of the page can be accessed solely by keyboard
commands. If it is possible to do that - not convenient, but possible
- then you probably comply.

Any required inputs must be voice-command enabled. A lot of that is
browser dependent, though, so standard formats like HTML and XML should
do the trick. For example, the Ghost help files are Windows CHM files
and since everything in the printed manual is in the help and vice
versa, that component complies.

If you would like, I can send you some of the URLs I have on file at 
work about all this - no confidential stuff, just links to save you 
search time.