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Halfway through March again, time to smell spring.
I’m also halfway through the Novell Certified Linux Professional training having just completed the second administration course. Very interesting stuff, but a bit much to take in all at once during 5 days.
I seem to be fiddling with half a dozen operating systems at the moment, which is cool, I just get random waves of information overkill every now and again.
After having picked up the Mac a few weeks ago I’ve been playing with it a lot and I must say, I’m very impressed. It’s a lot faster than I thought an old G4/350Mhz would be and it’s almost good enough for daily use. Almost, because ofcourse I couldn’t resist diving into the BSD side of things and the poor little box is currently spending a lot of time compiling software using the incredible Fink Commander. Le Mac really does offer the best of both worlds. The standard Mac apps are all beautifully integrated in ways that make the whole end user experience a lot more enjoyable than I thought possible. The ‘it just works’ credo holds true.
And there’s a lot more freeware available than I had imagined. Some of the things I’ve installed and use at the moment include Adium, VLC, SubEthaEdit, Cyberduck, MenuMeters, Growl & TigerLaunch, and that’s not counting all the software I know from Linux.
Some things seem to be noticeably missing for reasons I can’t comprehend.
Everyone seems to be so much in love with iTunes that there’s no real Winamp port. Now ok, iTunes does run a whole lot faster on the Mac but still, I can’t stand the interface compared to Winamp. I want my damn ‘normal’ playlist! I also have yet to find anything that comes even remotely close to Grabit, my favourite Usenet binary grabber.
Still, with the amount of buzz Apple is generating at the moment and switchers crawling out of the woodworks by the thousands (or so it seems), it can’t be long before more of that kind of software surfaces. And if not I still have my linux ports, hehe.

The new version of Os X, codename Tiger is rumoured to be released in April at which time all the Macs will be bumped to 512MB standard, so anyone wishing to buy one would be wise to wait another month.

I’m not getting one because I’m broke as f00k and I got shafted with my contract renewal. A lousy $50 a month rise…. whoopdee-fucking-doodaa. That’s inflation correction, not a raise. That still leaves me about $500 short compared to what I used to make. *grumbles* In a bizarre twist of fate they have agreed to pay me a MCSA training so I’ll actually know what I’m doing with the new SBS 2003 server we just got, I’m looking forward to that. so in a few months time I’ll have done enough and had enough training to go from admin n00b to fully qualified Linux and Windows sysadmin.
Not bad. Now if I could just afford the car check up next week life would look a whole lot sunnier.

C’est la vie.

I’m starting to get to that point where that line between work and hobby fade, quite possibly for the first time in my ‘career’, which I’m starting to like.
So the money’s not all that, but I kinda like the fact that I’m driving to work wondering what I’m going to fiddle with today.

Spent a lot of time this week on a Suse box which has been setup as a proxy and firewall for the second DSL line. And it’s working beautifully. I’m using Squid for the proxy, which took quite a while to figure out. It works out of the box but seeing as I’m using 2 NIC’s to bridge between the local network and the web and I wanted to set it up in a particular way that the proxy isn’t visible from the outside, all the traffic to the box HAS to go through the proxy and I wanted to implement access control lists so the main users only have limited access whereas me and my colleague have full access plus several other more advanced thingies I won’t bore you with… it took a while. Especially seeing as the config file is a (well documented) 55 page monster.
Ntop is a beautiful script for network stats with all the details and lovely views you could possibly ask for.

So all of this fiddling is making me like Linux more and more. It may take a little more time to set it up correctly than on Windows but it sure as hell is worth the effort.
Hehe, I still have to figure out why the damn thing is able to send out mails over the net without me having configured anything for mail. No smtp, no nothing, and trust me, I’ve checked everywhere, but when I use the mail command it still manages to send it out.

Meanwhile we upgraded our fileserver last week which was chugging along on Fedora Core 1 (don’t look at me, it wasn’t my idea) and spitting out 5MB worth of errorlogs on Samba alone each day to Core 3 and it’s been running silky smooth eversince. Ofcourse I plan on moving that to Suse as well eventually but for now this’ll do.

I have my second training in about 2 weeks, I’m looking forward to that, more tips and tricks and another step closer to becoming a NCLP.

In other random news, I bought an Apple! By accident, sort of…
I’d been bidding on some for a while, always making low bids and hoping I’d get lucky. But with the busyness and financial setbacks I’d forgotten about them, until some dude mailed me saying I’d won. So I went ‘eh’ and had to scroll back through my mail to see exactly what he was referring to, at which time the ‘eh’ changed to ‘ooooh’. So I’m now the proud new owner of a G4 PowerMac. It’s an old thing, running at 350Mhz, but it’s My First Mac so I’m still pretty damn pleased with it. Thanks to Commie for picking it up for me.