Happy New Year to all. I hope your holidays were pleasant. When I was young all the boys on my street would visit and play with each other's toys on Christmas. My favorite visits were to Lindale's, who had an American Flyer train set which was a bit different from my Lionel. American Flyer and Lionel were the dominant train companies in the fifties and sixties and the owners of each set had pride in their outfit while respecting and admiring the features of the other. Unlike the Windows and Mac/Linux 'wars' of today.
This holiday season was much like my childhood days in that my buddies and I played with and demonstrated Windows and Linux systems to each other. Will is quite an accomplished Windows system administrator. He showed how Windows servers can assist in the deployment and managment of multiple desktops in an organization. Really impressive stuff. I was so impressed that I came to the office, fired up an underutilized machine and installed Win Xp Pro with VmWare. Then I used VmWare to install a Windows 2000 Server instance. It worked fine after I figured out that I had to pin W2K to one processor on my dual core AMD machine. All was good in the neighborhood. Really slick stuff. The W2K server runs like a charm - just as expected.
So I fired up a session of VmWare and installed an Ubuntu 7.10 instance. Again it worked like a charm. In fact both W2K and Linux were running at the same time and my 'client' pc's were able to see and utilize their shares and web pages. Real slick stuff. The VmWare machines however seemed a little sluggish because the host machine has only 2 gig of ram. I started thinking about a decent long term solution and realized two things. I needed a machine and an os that would utilize more memory. Figuring out the machine part is not too challenging, pick a dual or quad core processor and mobo capable of 8 or 16 meg of ram and put either Vista or Linux on the box and off we go.
Having been trained as in both Unix (SCO) and Windows (NT 4) system administration I realize that I have a warm spot in my heart for Linux that Windows never garnered. Back in the day - I won't say which day - SCO ran a series of ads on in computer magazines. The ads pictured a desktop computer on a table in a glassed room. The PC had many cables coming from the back along with the heading Instant Mainframe. Now in those days mini's and mainframes ruled the roost and PC's were just becoming important as users realized that they could build their own data and reports without having to depend on and wait for the computer department to handle their requests. Networking as we know it was not quite full blown and Novell was just starting to get it together. Yet the promise of low cost, centrallized data stores and applications with PC's and terminals having access was tremedous. At my earliest I jumped on the chance to realize that potential with an SCO rig on.
A few years later Microsoft came around with NT 4 which was almost reliable. One of my employers at the time was running a Pick database on ATT System V and needed to upgrade his systems. The vendor of the primary application pushed the benefits of their Windows version and we bought into NT 4. It certainly was not as stable - In fact it was really problematic. Coming from the really stable unix world where we booted systems and let them run literrally for years without downtime, to the Win NT 4 world where we had to reboot weekly - or is it now called refresh - was a real drag. In my mind Microsoft's server products have still not rivalled the Unix experience.
And all this is in mind as I think about my future system, which at this point seems to be a quad core intel processor with 8 gig of ram with Linux as the host operating system and Windows Xp, 2KServer, 2003 Server and Vista as guest installations under VmWare. Wish me luck as I start the New Year with a new vision. I'l keep you posted.
Here's a shout to our new client. Ala Ritz Kiddie College in Cleveland. Ms Denson and her crew signed up for and have been using the RBA Webservices Child Care Attendance and Tracking System for almost a month now. They, along with First Fruits Child Care, have been pleased with the applicaton. Let me know if you would like a demo....
And by the way fusemail has been humming along with no trouble. I may have a solution.