Another busy month again! (but then again, are any of them not busy these days?)

WORK

I recently spent a whole weekend migrating a customer from a Windows 2003 Active Directory + Exchange server to a new Linux-based solution using Samba with roaming profiles and Scalix for email/calendering.

Considering the old system was out of RAM and ran out of disk, it was about time for an upgrade. Since the migration, desktop load times have dropped from up to an hour to a couple of minutes and the server is no longer running out of disk.

Amberdms has no major news to report – work is going slowly on the AOConf web-based administrative interface, simply due to the large amount of other tasks going on.

FLAT

In the weekend I got a server rack given to me by a colleague – I’ve now been able to put all my computer equipment into one place, which is going to make it a million times easier when I next move. (It took about 5 hours to get all the cabling set up for the rack).

It’s all been neatly wired up, with ethernet on one side, power on the other, and with all the power strips labeled (eg: “UPS Power” or “Surge Only”) to make it easy to maintain.

I also got myself 305m of Cat5e ethernet cabling, RJ45 connectors and a crimping tool – this is unbelievably useful – no more problems with cables being just 1m too short.

I’ve uploaded a couple of pictures – Back Side, Front Side and my cheap substitute for a rack shelf.

From the rack, I’ve run cables from the gaming machine to my desk, where I have my Mac Mini and display, as can be seen in this picture.

It’s still missing a lot of the gear that I haven’t yet moved to my flat, such as my file server and second UPS, so it’s currently looking a bit empty.

I think it’s really starting to look like a geek flat now… :-)

ARTICLES

I’ve updated my “Introduction to Linux Clustering” document with various spelling/grammatical fixes that people kept reminding me about, as well as using it as an opportunity to explain things better.