luminousmonkey.org

I’ve finally bowed to Windows.

Saturday 28 May 2011, 04:26 WST —

We live in a world that is dominated by the Windows operating system, of course, there are other options available. I’ve often switched around my operating system, pretty much I’ve always had a few hard drives in my PC so I could switch around as needed. I’ve always had Windows.

When I’ve been developing, a flavour of unix has always felt nice to work in. Especially when you’re looking for a cheap option for a server operating system. A unix is it. Pretty much any distro of Linux, Solaris, BSD, you have plenty of options. Also, if you’re after the most advanced filesystem that’s easily available, ZFS, then you need a unix. (As a personal note, I think that Apple really missed out not switching to ZFS).

Anyway! What the hell am I rambling about? Well at work, we’ve pretty much always run a *nix. Web, e-mail, database, storage, and the fax, always been either Linux, or recently Solaris. To be honest, it’s all worked just fine.

So why the post? Well, recently I’ve been working out on how to get our system working a bit better. Currently, we have no real intergration. For example, when we get a new employee, I need to create the user on the e-mail server, storage server, and our in house web software. To fix this, I started to look into something like NIS, or LDAP, and, well, it’s not something that is as simple as it should be.

What do I mean? Well that’s where Windows comes in, looking into what I would have to do for Solaris, I also had a look at the Microsoft option. Consulting a friend who knows far more about server configurations and system administration (heya Joe!) I decided to give Small Business Server a try.

I’m not going into it’s features, but since all the employee computers run Windows, and the fact that we get integration of e-mail and calendars, plus the added bonus of remote access to desktops, the price tag seems to be pretty worth it. With that, I’ve also removed Ubuntu from my development laptop and desktop. Windows has got me.

I’m as regular as diarrheatic baby

Tuesday 24 May 2011, 17:48 WST —

Ok, I have to admit that I have not really posted as much on my blog as I should have. I’m not under any illusions that anyone actually reads this, it’s just that I need more practice writing interesting and readable prose.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going write something here at least once a week, even if it’s just a few sentences. I actually do have a few drafts, but I’ve been mostly been using the blog as a notepad.