This is in response to Jeff and Damons comments to the last post.  I am the first one to admit that Linux is not ready for typical users but it is getting there.  Ubuntu/Kubuntu are very close to being extremely usable by the non-geek type.  I’ve even seen some brave people try it out.  They seemed to have a good experience.  Anyway, here are a couple of Mac commercial parrodies.

We are going to be chaging all of our servers at Decagon to Linux.  We have been running FreeBSD and have been very happy with it.  We have some new storage technology that isn’t supported in FreeBSD so we need to switch.  Anyway, we ordered a couple of books to aid in our knowledge and understanding of the Linux networking so we don’t get hosed.  One of these books is the Linux Networking Cookbook by Carla Schroder.  In flipping through the table of contents, there was a section that talked about secure remote administration.  It turns out that I had this completely awesome functionality enabled already.

What it does is allow me to create a tunnel using the ssh protocol and then the server will forward the X windows applications through that to the local computer.  This basically gives me a way to connect to my computer at work securely from anywhere that I have an internet connection.

This book has some other cool projects that we want to add to our list, like building a linux wireless access point and network monitoring.

I run Linux on all of my computers now.  I have to dual boot my computer at home so I can play my sim racing.  At work I have a virtual machine that allows me to run windows inside Linux so I can do the system administration on our ERP.  My laptop is Linux only.

Down with Microsoft!

This is the second time I’m writing this because I wrote last night and this morning moved the database and somehow corrupted the file or copied the wrong one. Anyway, here I go again.

As my one an only reader, you probably noticed that my site was down. Somehow my primary data drive failed with out warning. Had I been a good IT person, I would have been doing consistent backups. Unfortunately, this was not the case and I didn’t have any backups of any of it. I did have some copies of stuff from development so that was recoverable but I lost all of the dynamic data in the databases. I feel bad for everyone else that had information that was lost.

So, I was able to purchase a new server with help from family and friends. (THANK YOU!) The new one has 2 drives that are mirrored so if one fails the other one maintains a good copy of the information. I also used this server as a test environment for a Storage Area Network at Decagon. All of the user files, website, and databases reside on a special super geeky set of extremely reliable and redundant hard drives on the network. It’s working really well so far and it is really cool.

Anyway, enough of that talk. Here’s something rather entertaining. We passed it around Decagon and got mixed reactions. My initial reaction was a slight chuckle. Then I started to imagine what this person put themselves through.