Geek Stuff

I decided to go ahead and setup a Windows Live Spaces account which is kind of like the popular My Space but it's Microsoft. Anyway, the address is http://michaelwigle.spaces.live.com/ . It has some info my web site doesn't and vice versa. I'm mostly interested to see if I will actually blog a little on it. I've also created a Face Book account which is located at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=520545213. I've also started using Quanta as my web editor so there may be some major overhauling to the web site in time as I learn to use more advanced features.

Well, the server died, long live the server! My old $200 Walmart machine which served as a server for 5 years finally bit the biscuit. First the hard drive went so I replaced it. Then the onblard NIC went and I decided it was time to retire it. So, I now have a new server with great thanks to my friend Will who was able to give it to me for a $100! My new server is actually a server too! It's a Dell PowerEdge 4400. It has 2 GB RAM, 170GB of drive space across a 6 disk RAID-5 array. It has 3 redundant power supplies, and 5-100 Mbps NICs. It's pretty sweet.

I'm running Courier 0.47 as my e-mail server and it's a very slick package. It allows remote web mail access and all the usual POP, IMAP, and SMTP connections. Setting it up properly can be a bit of a pain if your fumbling in the dark like me but I had it up and running in a few evenings. There is a graphical web interface that can help with some of the setup. However, it can be a pain to setup with Apache 2 unless you're comfortable with setting up SSL for your cgi-bin folder (which I'm not) so I cheated a found an insecure work-around (please don't hack me) :P. Here is the link to the remote web mail.

I'm running Apache 2.0.54-5sarge1 for my web server. I realize that all of these are older versions but they are the supported versions for the stable version of Debian. When the new stable version is released I expect to upgrade. We'll see what happens then (probably alot of reworking on my part).

On my workstation I'm running Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I've found it to be an excellent desktop linux. It's very stable and I infrequently run into things on the Internet I can't access (usually on Microsoft sites) and the few things I come across like that I'm happy to move along and do business with web sites using open standards. It's certainly nice to not have to worry every time I click on a link that I may be clicking something that will take me to a site that installs a keylogger or trojan in the background. Since the vast majority of them only work on Windows machines. I have considered installing AVG for Linux and a third-party firewall with a nice GUI though. We'll see.

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