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I am busy (while customers are away, getting unseasonably tanned) upgrading a linux cluster currently acting as file server to samba3 and ldap 2.2. On the first day I was lucky: the server won't see the new 140GB disks, only 80GB and for this I had to flash the raid controller (Adapted 2100s) the server won't boot from cd and I had to reset bios settings to default a DDS4 (boasting 20GB native capacity) drive is not able to backup a 15GB partition One day completely lost and looks like my holidays are shrinking... UPDATE: just to make sure that things go as wrong as possible somebody planned to rearrange the power supplies while I was plugging the new disks on the second system. Another hour wasted... 3 Jan 2005, Update: all users came back to their offices and I must say that I was a little worried. The system was not really ready in my opinion, but luckily all went well. Only three of them were locked out because of the password being lost in the migration....

Today I have been busy migrating a qmail/vpopmail server from an old machine (that was giving signs of disk problems) to a brand new proliant dl 380. The whole migration process (comprised of installation of the new server) took only one day and a half! While I was at it I threw into the new server nagios , so now I can have a quick look at what's going on in the network at any time. I replaced amavis/uvscan with qmail-scanner and clamav , we'll see how it goes... Merry xmas to all!

Yesterday I deployed a cluster solution with SuSE Linux enterprise server 8 and drbd: just awesome! SuSE is definitely my favourite distro for their excellent administration tool ( yast ), Oracle support, documentation and security features. This week I also had a chance to install SLES9 and I must say that I am impressed. They have tight integration with ldap already in the installation procedure and even SSL certificate management tools! I have used RedHat Enterprise in the past and now I find it primitive if compared to SuSE. Keep up the good work!

Life is good. Even if computers break too often and playing catch up is not funny at all. Three disks crashed in two days: a firewall and a mail server, not bad!