Sparkfun = Cool, Customer Service = BAD

I'm a geek when I want to be and I really dig tinkering with EE, gadgets and hardware. SparkFun is one of those places you could easily spend days dreaming up oodles of projects to put together.

As much as I think they are cool, when a dude like me gets rubbed the wrong way one too many times from them, I tend to think otherwise. It all started back in Sept 2007; been looking for a breakout board for a GPS module I have and SparkFun had what I needed. I get the breakout board in the mail to find out there's design flaw on the board that won't even allow you to plug the certain GPS module I have into it. I contacted SparkFun, they owned up to the flaw and said they need to get rid of their current stock (which at the time was around 60-ish) so they can put the new stock up with the revision.

Well... after several e-mails, many lies and false hopes that the *next* batch of breakout boards were the ones I needed with this so-called 'revised' fix, on July 30, 2008 (almost 10 MONTHS!) I was notified that the new revision was finally in and placed an order.

Today, August 3, 2008, I get the long, awaited package. Do you think it was this breakout board for my GPS module? Nope. It was something complete different; something that wasn't even in the same fucking realm as to what I was expecting. It was like ordering a pizza and getting ape shit in box delivered instead.

So I most certainly called immediately and what's really *odd* about this is, it's like they were expecting my call. I was transferred to the gentleman that apparently packaged and/or put together my order and the first thing he said was, "Here's your 2-Day FedEx tracking number for your item you didn't get. We'll be enclosing a return shipping label for the wrong parts we sent you.", all within the first 20 seconds of the conversation. It's like they were expecting me to call because of one two reasons: 1) Human error, or 2) They *said* that their PCB revision was in but it really is not, and did not have their run finished, so they sent me bogus shit in return to stall while their production run finished. You be the judge on the conspiracy theory...

The point I'm trying to make here is: SparkFun has cool shit and I might buy from them again, but if they fuck up, don't expect them to win your heart and mind over.

PAM max login limits in RedHat Enterprise 5

I found something surprisingly 'odd' with pam_limits.so library when setting up and base lining a few servers the other day at work.

For some reason you can not concurrently use both 'maxsyslogins' and 'maxlogins' at the same time in your /etc/security/limits.conf file to set max authenticated user/group logins per user or system. With my intentions of having a limits of anyone part of, lets say, the 'users' group, could not have more than 3 separate simultaneous logins into the box with a maximum hard limit of 15 total system logins just doesnt seem to work.

So if you're going to try something like this:

@users hard maxlogins 3
* hard maxsyslogins 15

...didn't work for me. I have noticed, also, if you have a particular user who is part of several groups (e.g. users and devel groups) and you have limits for both of those groups, once the first group limits is matched, it goes with that rule. But if you have any idea on how to get 'maxlogins' and 'maxsyslogins' to work together, I'd be happy to know.