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Wed, 16 Jan 2008

We're back. And, we won.

Actually I never went away, yes 22 months is a long time between blog entries, I just got distracted by travelling and working at AwayPhone. I'm still there and we are looking for one or two developers, principally in the US (Washington state) — but as a global company, not necessarily — so let us know (ASCII only, spell-checked, coherent English, etc.) if you are interested.

I've been on (technically) holidays for the past few weeks, but I find myself awake, reviewing code at 02:45 (now 03:30) and trying to catch up on emails. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who always used to shout “RELAX!” whenever we went bar-hopping. I've been trying to apply that to a broader area of life than just bars but it appears that it just isn't how I'm wired to operate; for better or worse.

That means, that whilst in Australia, I'm also rebuilding my mothers' IT infrastructure at her publishing company. I want it all to survive without any intervention for at least 2 years. So, I've been evaluating various pieces of kit. My conclusions:

NetGear
Switches, Modems (ADSL) and Wireless access points
Western Digital
Linux NAS boxes (they have Samba, rsync and SSH on pre-installed. I'd expect a firmware update from the makers to incorporate iSCSI and allow you to join a domain shortly).
HP
Desktops and Servers. Although I wish Bdale has some influence within HP and I did not have to taint the kernel of my servers. Seriously, it is because of that I re-do a price/functionality check everything time I go to purchase a machine. HP only just get it right.
Linksys / Cisco - snom
VoIP handsets. To be honest, this category is still being evaluated; but I'm leaning towards snom.

I realise everyone has probably been burnt but some of the vendors mentioned above but this is my experience of them. You'll notice nothing about laptops. I'm looking around for a decent vendor, I'll let you know if I find one.

If you have been following along, you will notice that the Netgear ADSL modems (DM111P) runs Linux. The WD MyBook World Editions II's, run Linux (and I'd expect that they could be coaxed very easily into running generic Debian). The HP stuff (mostly) runs Linux. As does the Linksys and snom handsets.

We won.

Now, I've got to figure out how to setup Clonezilla so that the desktop Windows machines can be replaced when they fail. And I have less than 144 hours to do so. There is nothing like a deadline to concentrate your mind.

P.S. I do have some half-finished entries for the intervening 22 months, I will clean them up and post them under their original dates in the next few weeks

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ॐ (aum) - what was, what is and what will be, wildfire's musings

Anand Kumria
wildfire@progsoc.org

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