Moving the mail from home to the Google hosted service really has made my daily and weekly admin easier.
The main thing that’s changed is the amount of spam and the infrastructure needed to manage it:
The last few spam coming in are for the non-switched domains – they’ll be switched over at the end of this week.
I finally moved the mail service to Google Apps.
I looked long and hard; and even thought about moving the mail to a hosted environment for a few months.
Finally I tested out the google hosted email service – and it looks pretty good.
On the positives:
The only downsides are around:
At the end of the day this frees up two servers running multiple services; and saves me the backup and availability headaches.
It should also give family a better experience (webmail/POP to a google datacenter rather than to my server) and give me more bandwidth to play with.
This was released at the end of last week – and it’s running on one of my blogs (this one – www.evilzenscientist.com)
Still running 2.3.x on the others – mainly for the Gallery 2 integration plugin WPG2.
WPG2 is a great plugin, ozgreg and capt_kirk have done a great job of making the join between the blogging and photo gallery worlds. Apparantly some heavy lifting is needed to integrate with WP2.5.
One of the things I get to plan is moving the IT infrastructure. Pulling the plugs and moving the servers is the easy part; but what about the DSL, static IP, mail, MX records, DNS..
I think I’ve found a solution for the mail (hosting the mail server) and the DNS is already moved out and re-hosted on two different DNS servers. Might be just web-mail for a week or so – but that’s more than enough.
The blogs and photos will be offline while the servers are on the move – the rest of the infrastructure is just internal stuff; NAS, print, authentication etc.
Any hints and tips from those that have moved SLES and Windows 2003 servers before?
Slowly but surely moving towards general availability.
Download from here.
I’ve got three Apple Airport Express units to stream music around the house. They work really well – and when used with Rogue Amoeba Airfoil I can play pretty much any music now via Airtunes.
However… I’ve had a sticky problem for the last year – 50% of the time iTunes or Airfoil just can’t see all of the Airport Express boxes. I’ve spent a lot of time researching Bonjour (aka Rendezvous, zero touch, multicast DNS) and doing packet traces. No joy. Everything looks fine; the multicast DNS is working fine over 5353; the radius is within limits; firewalls are non-blocking; the data is not crossing a router. I was stumped.
Tonight I think I fixed the issue. As part of de-cluttering for the impeding house move I took my last 802.11b device off the wireless subnet and bumped the configuration to be exclusively 802.11g. Instantly everything started working.
So in summary: Airport Express, Airtunes, iTunes and Airfoil really work well on an exclusive 802.11g network.
Hope this helps someone else.
Most hotel internet connections use an outbound SMTP proxy to store and forward email.
I’m never happy with that – it means that my mail could be delayed/lost/corrupted/tampered with/read on the way.
[Note: I know – SMTP is SMTP – it’s not secure; it’s like writing a postcard – but if I can avoid that proxy – it’s one less set of eyes..]
I’ve now configured Thunderbird to connect to a high port that’s NATted back down to port 25; I’ve also forced TLS to the mail server.
In theory that should keep my outbound mail (or really internal mail that only sits on my web server) a bit safer.
(Not a rant; I’ve not had the Kool Aid or the Lobotomy yet..)
Really only of interest to US readers – those in Europe probably have no idea of the context here.
My 16 month old boy needed tympanostomy tubes (ear tubes or ear grommets) to drain off fluid from a recurring ear infection. A five minute procedure – but it does involve day surgery and a general anesthetic.
My previous health care benefits were excellent – friends in Utah kept telling us we had incredible insurance – with good coverage, choice and a reasonable deductible and co-pay. Even so we estimated that we would end up being around $750 out of pocket for the ear tubes.
Microsoft Health care is fully funded. No deduction from my pay; no co-pay; no deductible. Incredible.
Before I joined Microsoft everyone I knew who had joined raved about the benefits. Now I know it’s true.
Take a look at this: http://www.viewmyworld.com/ – especially the first video on Microsoft Perks.
So what changed between running a laptop at Novell and Microsoft?
Desktop OS
Firstly my Novell laptop was primarily a Vista machine. I’ve been using Vista as my primary desktop since November 2006. It’s helped build a better ZENworks Configuration Management.
Microsoft is obviously standardised on Vista.
Collaboration
Email is the killer. I do miss a lot of the advanced features of GroupWise – particularly the email status tracking. Outlook/Exchange won’t show me the delivery/read/deleted status. GroupWise was a killer in knowing that your ‘red’ emails had been delivered and deleted without being opened.
I don’t miss GWIM at all; I still use Pidgin (formerly GAIM) as my IM client – running plugins to all of the major networks. I do really like the Unified Communications via Office Communicator and Outlook. One thing that Microsoft IT has done well is brought together IM, email, fax, voice and voice messaging into a single place.
Applications
Obviously most of the Microsoft internal sites are IE only. (Great UI, great user experience – but lots of ActiveX). I’m also running Firefox 3 Beta 4 – that’s my personal preference.
No OpenOffice – that’s a given; one thing that did surprise me was that everyone is using the newer Office 2007 doc formats; even to outside people.
Network and access
Wow. I was really impressed by the IT organisation. IPv6 on the wire; IPsec everywhere; smartcard and certificate security for wireless and remote access; Network Access Controls running with quarantine.
Certainly it’s given me some new ideas for my home network 🙂
A new and faster server for the web site, blogs and photos.
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