2^4 instances of technobabble at its finest
Little notes from work, and life …
(1) Win2k3 is REALLY picky about where it slipstreams SP1. It won’t do it to the I386 from my install cd. No explanation I can come up with other than that the CD’s from Dell, not from Microsoft.
(2) Sharepoint is pretty sw33t. Speaking of 2k3 services. For a midsized workgroup (say, 20-100 people) collaborating in an ms-office based workflow, sharepoint and exchange integrated together make for an awesome solution. And I hear Sharepoint portal server is even sw33ter.
(3) Win2k3′s domain controller services are also sw33t. Things like remote installation in particular, group policy rollouts, and stuff like that are also really nice for a domain environment. Really digging down into it, I’m surprised how slick a lot of these features are. The only things I can really say against 2k3 are (a) it’s not free, and (b) it’s built on things that have bad track records (like XP technologies).
(4) between 2 and 3, I can see why the KCC admin runs a win2k3 domain instead of a samba domain. Though he’d do that anyway, he’s a windows guy.
(5) Samba still has some definite advantages in my book. Like, for one, it doesn’t make me run windows on critical infrastructure servers. And for another, it’s easier to manage certain things.
(6) It’s fun scavenging memory from various machines, to try to make one machine into twice the machine that it is. I took the memory from one workstation and put it into the 2k3 machine (which has other bigger plans and is going to need the free ram to accomodate them all). Then I took the memory from two other workstations and combined it into one machine. Now, since it’s rdram, I’ve got two machines with nothing but crimms in them, one machine with 4x128mb rimms in it, and the 2k3 machine has 4x256mb rimms in it.
(7) By the way, rdram blows, for a lot of reasons. And crimms are one big reason, and rambus corp is another big reason.
(8) When was the last time you updated your cygwin install? It’s probably been a while. You should keep a copy of setup.exe around, just to update on a relatively regular basis, or the updates are KILLER. like, deinstall package, download new package, install new package killer. Like on a totally out of date machine with a complete install on it, 30 minutes of updates killer.
(9) You can never, EVER have too much CAT5. EVER.
(10) Commercial software is expensive. And in commercial operating systems, I can’t right-click and start an xterm, at least not nearly as easily. I should do something about that…
(11) Remote registry and hidden admin shares … I used to think they had no reason to exist. Now I’m glad they’re there … just that you need to be in the right environment for them to make sense.
(12) Remote desktop is cool. Full-blown windows terminal services is just plain awesome though.
(13) I don’t feel comfortable wearing my “bow before me, for I am root” shirt anymore. I’ve had to explain it too many times. Too many people don’t get it. The people who do get it still mostly don’t get it. I’m more comfortable in my “No, I will not fix your computer” shirt, despite the fact that I spend all my time fixing people’s computers.
(14) I wish I knew more about bind, and ssl. I wish I knew anything at all about mailservers. I think I’ll try to set up a mailserver, quietly on the phsi server, firewalled off from the world, and see what happens. When I’ve got time. Which will be pretty far off in the future, I’m sure.
(15) Sometimes you’ve got to just bite the bullet and put the machine out there on the net. Behind a bridging firewall with an extensive and well-tuned iptables ruleset, of course.
(16) Mod_proxy might be a better answer than I was thinking of, after all….