BillMonk is a free service that makes it easy to track expenses between friends, and to settle them up instantly online. Particularly popular with roommates, young professionals, and college students, it has been used for splitting bills like rent, utilities, meals, and beers. BillMonk also allows users to keep track of books, DVDs, or other items that they have lent to or borrowed from their friends.

In addition to working on the website, everyone kept busy this past month setting up our new office on beautiful Lake Union. It’s been a bit chaotic, but also a lot of fun.

Last night, we announced that Billmonk was acquired by Obopay, Inc.!

We are delighted to announce that BillMonk has been acquired by Obopay, Inc.

Obopay built the first comprehensive mobile person-to-person payments service in the US that lets you instantly send money to anyone using your mobile phone (SMS, WAP, or a downloadable app), or a web browser.

When we first talked to the Obopay team it was clear to us that they care deeply about making it easier to deal with money. Given that BillMonk’s goal is to make money painless between friends, the match couldn’t have been better.

As a first step of integration, BillMonk now lets you settle up your debts online via Obopay! Simply login and click on the new ‘Settle up with Obopay‘ action. Today’s beta release makes it easy to send money to a phone number; we will soon follow up with the ability to send money to an email address.

Now that the dust has just about settled, we are looking forward to devoting all of our time into delivering some exciting new features, so stay tuned to both the BillMonk blog, and Obopay.com!

More information about the acquisition:

• BillMonk blog post
• Obopay Press Release

We are still looking to hire a few more people, so if you are in the Seattle area, check out our Jobs page!

Alki Beach (Seattle, WA)

Does anyone know what these things are called? They were sticking up out of the sand all over. The (3) pictures are pretty bad, they looked like long worms or worm-like plants, or something.

When we got back to the office I didn’t get any work done. I can’t say I am suprised.

While cleaning I found a few interesting things:

I’ll post any other photos here.

Here is an artist’s rendering of the event:

There ended up not being any fire, but I could have DIED.

These RPMs work much better:

• http://people.redhat.com/jorton/Taroon-svn/

At this point I’ll assume that winbind/samba are both already configured and working properly.

You can test this using wbinfo -g, which should list all domain groups:

[root@felix ericb]# wbinfo -g|more
BUILTIN\System Operators
BUILTIN\Replicators
BUILTIN\Guests
BUILTIN\Power Users
BUILTIN\Print Operators
BUILTIN\Administrators
BUILTIN\Account Operators
BUILTIN\Backup Operators
BUILTIN\Users
Domain Computers
Domain Users
Domain Guests
...etc...

1. Install mod_auth_pam, which can be downloaded from http://pam.sourceforge.net/mod_auth_pam/

   LoadModule auth_pam_module              modules/mod_auth_pam.so

   
   

2. Enable PAM authentication for each directory you want
   
   

   
     Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "LIONIMTS"
     AuthPAM_Enabled on
     require valid-user
     Order deny,allow
   

   
   

3. Edit /etc/pam.d/httpd so it looks as follows:
   
   

   #%PAM-1.0
   
   auth required /lib/security/pam_winbind.so
   account required  pam_permit.so

   Note: On my Gentoo systems this file was called /etc/pam.d/apache2.
   
   

4. Restart apache, everything should be a go!

Today I finally got rid of the very last SCO OpenUNIX system at work, and boy are we happy. After actually having used one of SCO’s products I can safely say that all the shit they get from, well, the entire IT community at this point is completly justified – they have no product anyone they want and are comletly desperate. The system crashes randomly all the time (even when sitting completly idle for three weeks), is slow as dirt, and just totally sucks.

One very intresting thing about the OS is how they have the filesystem set up. The entire system resides in /opt/K/SCO/ with symlinks into /bin, /usr/bin, etc.

Snip of /bin directory listing:

ls -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/ls
lx -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/ls
m4 -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/m4
mail -> /opt/K/SCO/MailUA/1.0.4a/usr/bin/mail
mc68k -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/false
mcs ->  /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/usr/bin/mcs
mesg -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mesg
mkdir -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mkdir
mkfifo -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mkfifo
mt -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mt
mv -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/cp
ncheck -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/etc/ncheck

And be sure to add /etc to your path. Yes, I said /etc. Among the configuration files are lots of binaries, to keep them company perhaps?

Snip of file types in /etc:

/etc/smmck:	sh commands text
/etc/smuxtcl:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/snmp:	directory
/etc/snmpd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/snmpd.comm:	ascii text
/etc/snmpd.conf:	ascii text
/etc/snmpd.peers:	ascii text
/etc/snmpd.trap:	ascii text
/etc/statd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/strcf:	ascii text
/etc/strcf.d:	directory
/etc/suds_ctrl:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/swap:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/sysadm.d:	directory
/etc/sysdef:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/sysdump:	iAPX 386 COFF demand-paged executable
/etc/syslog.conf:	English text
/etc/syslog.pid:	ascii text
/etc/syslogd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/systemid:	ascii text
/etc/talkd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386

I spent half of yesterday/part of this morning attempting to do a full drive backup with no luck, first I tried taring to an ssh pipe, which resulted in a broken pipe for some reason after about 50 megs.

tar clzf - / | ssh ericb@server1 cd /service/archive/server2\;cat > root.tar.gz

Next I tried an NFS mount which died taking the entire system down with it after about 30 seconds.

And finally I tried a pipe to smbclient which went at about 1MB/minute and eventaually stalled never to send a byte again.

So I scratched the full backup idea, had someone manually backup important files, and ended SCO’s rain of hell on the company once and forall.

- First Photo
- Second Photo