Between the holidays and a very busy January, February, and March I have been a “bad blogger” — having allowed such a long period of “radio silence”. I actually just found this post in draft form that I had started in January but never got round to publishing. Aside from “real work” (i.e. work that pays the bills :-), I’ve been taking care of some sys admin kind of things like:
- Switching my wireless network from two WAPs (a ‘b’ and a ‘g’ access point) using WEP for security to a single WAP using WPA and a strong passphrase. This required using an add on ‘g’ card for the older Fujitsu laptop.
- Switching to a managed antivirus/firewall solution for the machines on my LAN at home
- Experimenting with VMWare — bought the Workstation version which allows you to create, manage (cool things like cloning and snapshots), and run virtual machines on your PC (e.g. I was running w2k verver with Oracle 8.1.7 in a vm on my WinXP pro desktop). Then I used the box that I freed up to set up VMWare Server with CentOS 4.3 without X (i.e no desktop UI) as the host OS. Picked up a second 200GB drive (400GB total) and upgraded RAM to 3GB. This allows for plenty of storage for VM files and plenty of RAM for running multiple VMs simultaneously. This is way cool technology and allows the flexibility to maintain multple configurations to support multiple environments for various client projects and bring them up and down on demand. This sure beats my old practice of switching harddrives in and out!