I have been using os X Lion since one of the dev previews. I have been using os X since Jaguar and I have to say it has been one of the least painful upgrades ever.


In general the system works a bit faster than under snow leopard (I do have a new macbook pro and macbook air with i7), all my hardware worked without problems (printers, scanner, audio interfaces, midi controllers), most apps worked fine, some of the GUI changes are nice and the apparent gui changes are not so huge for me.

But first the bad:

- The themes of addresbook and ical are fugly. Incredibly fugly. Also not entirely sure about the new layout of address book, but no buggy for me
- Launchpad is not really my thing. I use mostly alfred to start apps
- Although safari is a but faster, it still hemmorages memory. This may also be related to some extensions I use.
- Apps that broke: silver fast SE (I now use vuescan), gpgmail (there is an alpha which works so so), ableton live (there is a beta)
- AFP changes which at first broke authentication to my NAS. With a beta firmware my NAS now works fine.
- Full screen mode sucks in dual head mode
- Had one kernel panic on my air
- Some gestures conflict with gestures of applications
- The remembering of the state of an app, with it’s open windows and documents is hit and miss, depending on the app
- Some finder changes are not so great or need getting used to: invisible Library (easily fixed), sidebar, all my documents


The good:

- My old macbook pro was getting very slow on snow leopard, but on lion it is quite snappy again
- Whole disc encryption with file vault on the air works very well, no visible performance penalty
- Airdrop works very well, but I would like it if it also worked with wired ethernet
- Launchpad is okayish, but I use mostly alfred for application start or the dock
- I like Mission control, for me it works better than spaces and expose
- The fullscreen mode works very nicely on my small 11” macbook air
- The new scrolling direction actually makes a lot of sense
- Using gestures works very well on my touchpad or magic pad
- Pf is now apparently the standard os X firewall (Not sure since when), I like it a lot better than the old ipf.
- I like the way of resizing windows and the handling of scrollbars, although sometimes the bottom part of the window is not well visible
- Mail.app is snappier, I like the three pane layout, threading and full screen mode
- WebGL in safari


What I had to do:
- Reinstall the ABN amro identifier driver
- Install the beta of gpgmail, ableton live
- Switch to vuescan from silver fast. At the moment I like it better
- Installed lion tweaks. Witht hat I made Library folder visible, and removed the fugly themes of address book and ical
- Some app updates, most of which came very quickly after the release of Lion


in the end, there are not that many big changes in user interface for me, at least no negative ones, and some positive ones. I still work like I used to, with terminal tabs, with alfred, but I use full screen apps on my MBA. I work slightly different on my air than on my MBP with extra screen.

Tags: sysadmin

I am finally migrating my server. The hardware is about the same: Supermicro Detroit, intel core duo2 2.4 GHz, 3ware 9xxx sata raid controller, 2 x 1 G samsung sata harddisc. The colo will be the same, coloclue with whom I still am very happy.

What will change is the OS setup. The old system runs on FreeBSD 8, 64 bits, with an extra jail. The new system runs on vmware vsphere 4.1 (formerly esxi) and ubuntu linux LTS 64 bit.

Why the change? I got extremely frustrated with freebsd. Upgrading the system is a hassle. Binary updates with freebsd-update never seemed to work for me, and cvsup + make buildworld is a bit more of a hassle. But updating the system is a picknick compared to updating ports. With a combo of portupgrade, portmaster and manual updates I got myself more than often in dependency hell. Updating with binaries was preferred, but binaries in freebsd if they are available are extremely minimal, for example, no mysql support in postfix.

Ubuntu may not be better in every aspect, but at least ugrading is so much less of a hassle. apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade should do the trick. I also like the way things are organized with update alternatives and with sites/modules for apache, and the whole configuration scheme. Not all is perfect of course, config is not always consistent, the vmware tools are not available as deb packages and some more things I will encounter. I am also experiencing some performance issues, which I have to resolve.

There are also a lot of things I will miss from freebsd, like pf (ufw is not bad, but is only firewall, not routing or nat), control-t in terminal and things like zfs, d-trace, which I did not use but has a lot of potential.

For now, I am slowly migrating, which is a lot of work and progresses slowly, small changes in the setup needs tuning, I need to migrate site by site, and especially mail is going to be hard. But we are getting there.

Tags: linux,sysadmin,server

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