For a week now, I have been knee deep in a reorganization and revitalization of the IT infrastructure at MFConsulting. These changes include both hardware and software. Let me detail some of it:
MFConsulting has three servers that face the internet and three internal ones. All of the outward facing ones had been running Red Hat Linux 9.0 and 2 of the internal ones were running Windows 2000 Server (performing roles of Primary Domain Controller and MS SQL Server respectively). The Linux boxes have always been Samba 2.x enabled and were configured as workgroup members of the NT Domain. Most of these computers had only Intel CPUs that by now are both ancient and slow.
The new hardware line up will have three computers that are powered by AMD Athlon XP 2600 and one gigabyte of memory a piece. There will also be two servers built with AMD Athlon 64 3000 and also y gig of RAM. The video adapters for all these systems will now be nVidia chipset cards and all hard drives will likely be SATA, SCSI III or a combination of the two interface technologies in some cases.
All systems have been piece together by me from either Fry's Electronics or NewEgg.com. Two servers will configured with Novell SLES and the rest with SuSe Linux 9.3. The two SLES boxes have been configured as Primary Domain Controller and Backup Domain Controller using Samba 3.0 with an LDAP back end. Although, not finished configuring it yet, I intend to have LDAP replication working very shortly. I have decided to move away from MS SQL Server but to maintain an RDBMS that uses Transact SQL. Obviously that can only be Sybase AES for Linux.
This major overhaul is long overdue but most important is the fact that like Hernan Cortez, I too have decided to “burn the ships” to motivate the troops. This will be a good example of eating my own dog food. You see, next Tuesday (Aug 2, 2005) begins a new era for the Martinez family. That day is my last day of employment with Healthvision. This coming week also signals the exact week when Paquito would have returned from Iraq – His unit is now in Kuwait awaiting orders to return to Fort Carson in Colorado Spring. On August 20th, Paquito was supposed to separate from the service and would have joined his Dad in his effort to establish a consultancy in the North Texas area to help folks with their implementations of Linux, Mono, Open Source and graphic design needs.
To summarize, SLES Rocks, AMD is the processor to have and Mono rules!
Almost forgot...
If you can go to OSCON 2005 and see some of the great talks about Mono that folks like Kevin Shockey, Joseph Hill, Edd Dumbill, Niel Bornstein and a few others will be giving.
In the next couple of weeks I will begin to have a bit more time for all things Mono and other important matters for the Windows/Linux developer community.
That is all.
(For now...)
Over the past year, I have made various attempts to share the techniques that I use to create the Mono Combined installer for Windows. As the release date for Mono 1.2 draws nearer, Novell prepares to become the packager of the Mono for Windows installer. To assist with the hand off, I have created a snapshot of the build directory that I used to emit the Mono 1.1.8 installer.
Folks wanting to create a specific installer for a particular need may find this useful. You can learn more about the construction kit in this location.
I am a bit nostalgic because this signals the end of an era for me. However, Novell is a great company and my best hope for an international enterprise class computing leader on software innovation. The installer could not be in better hands!