Getting back on track

After a long, LONG time, I'm finally back on the road to updating my mail server setup. I eluded to setting up a new system a while back, and I'm starting to make progress on it. A tip of my hat to "Joe" at adminspotting.net for his messaging server setup. Some bugs arose with CentOS 5 on x86_64 and dovecot, but other than that, so far so good. The nuts-n-bolts of SMTP/POP/IMAP are setup and next is the anti-virus, anti-spam, greylisting, etc. etc. gauntlet.

An Ode to memcached

When your servers are hurting
And your database needs some relief
Something small, simple and efficient
Can make your response times brief

Sometimes, you don't need anything fancy
You just need something good
My friend is lightweight and speedy
And he does exactly what he should

Keys and values
Hashes and slabs
K.I.S.S.
And viola! it all just works

So go forth, apply caching
And let your servers rest.
Because any sysadmin will tell you,
memcached is the best.

mmm... RAM

Upgraded the MacbookPro to 4GB of RAM. Now I can run Parallels and whatever else without any hint of running out of memory. With the cost of ram being ridiculously low, I couldn't see any reason to suffer with Parallels and less RAM. Vista Business is crashing something fierce, but XP seems solid for now. Now I have to work on getting everything off ye olde PC to turn it into a shiny new linux box.

YACC

This time, it stands for "yet another computer cliche" - specifically I've 'switched'. My job got me a new 15.4" MacBookPro and I love it. OS 10.5 ('Leopard' as all the 'in' mac geeks call it) is extra slick. With this 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, Spaces and Expose are wicked fast and impressive looking. However, I realize how required they are. With Windows you can always see every instance of every window in the taskbar, even if it's barely there and you can see only half an icon. I can't imagine how a Mac user found running apps before Expose. For IM, Adium is great. At it's core, I believe it's a port of GAIM, but the one thing that's missing is IRC. For that, I use Colloquy - a nice, beautiful looking client. Wifi and OpenVPN were a snap. Connecting to my samba shares on the Linux server was also easy, but the printer was more complex. The biggest gotcha so far has been HEAT... it is running damn hot. I've installed Temperature Monitor and smcFanControl based on a co-worker's recommendation and a message board thread. It mostly heats up running Parallels, but I've also had a Dashboard widget go bonkers on me too.

I've also recently purchased a slice, but more on that when I get to do something with it.