I am finalizing the migration of my old to my new server. The last steps where email and dns, and this has been relatively painless. Some things that helped where:
- rsync 3.0.0. It is so much faster than rsync 2.x.
- powerdns. I moved from bind to powerdns with mysql backend. It is quite a joy to have your zones in a mysql database. Change MX records in one go with a simple query.
- poweradmin, a webinterface for powerdns. Not perfect, but combined with mysql queries you have a rather powerful combo.
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Tags: sysadmin,unix,freebsd,java

I love FreeBSD. Some time ago I switched from linux to freebsd on my servers. Read More...

Tags: freebsd,unix,sysadmin

So management at my previous company decided that we should go enterprise, thus replacing our unix boxes which run on freebsd or debian with redhat enterprise linux. It's enterprise right, so it should be good? Anyway, redhat is not necessarily that bad, al though a lot less well thought out compared to debian or ubuntu for example. Anyway, the mail server was migrated to redhat, but then we discovered that redhat is extremely conservative with filesystems and only provides ext3 and gfs. Our mailserver still had a mailspool on xfs. This was a bit annoying. So.. centos to the rescue! Centos is the GPL version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So it is mostly identical to redhat, minus some tools. It also uses yum and rpm packages of centos and redhat are interchangeable. Centos is identical to Red Hat, but centos has centos plus, which is a repository with additional goodies. So this solved our problem: we installed a centos plus kernel + headers and xfs tools, and now the server is happily running kerio mail server on redhat EL 5, with xfs. How ever, you do need to realize that your server is no longer a real Red Hat EL server, which affects you getting support. But for now it runs, but don't tell your PHB!

Tags: sysadmin,linux,redhat,centos,xfs

I discovered rapidweaver thanks to the tips of a few friends of mine. The problem was, I did not have the time to build a new website from scratch, including writing new css and html code and all that. And not for every site I need a completely original homemade website. And more important than that: it is better to have a website which is not homemade, with off the shelf templates, than NO site at all. So rapidweaver. It is extremely easy to setup a website quickly with blog, slideshow etc. It is also quite reasonably priced. See: Rapidweaver.

Tags: sysadmin,webdesign,mac,software

So I was looking for some way to implement my blog in a secure and safe way. I considered a lot of options, like wordpress (which is a festering pile of securety bugs), drupall (of which I am quite enthousiastic) and nucleus (which runs my old blog, but is not ideal). I wanted it to be secure, fast and scalable, which has for me a higher priority than features. So I thought, why not just generate static html? So this is how I do it, using rappidweaver, which I can highly recommend. I will talk about rapidweaver later.

Tags: sysadmin,software,mac,rapidweaver