This OS is designed pretty effectively to provide a business infrastructure. The $500 version is similar to MS Windows Small Business Server, but it's limited to 10 users - the $999 version is unlimited. You get some pretty impressive integration and a few extras, so it's pretty much a comparable offering to Small Business Server Premium.
There is nothing in here that you can't do with Open Source, but it is nice to see it all wrapped up together in a unified package that actually seems like it was designed that way. If you think about it, you'd spend at least that much on getting someone to implement the unification if you wanted to go Open Source, so it's not such a bad deal.
I'm not going to get into price comparison or feature comparison. I just happened to like what I saw.
If there was a truly killer app that comes with the server package, it's the app called podcast producer. I can't do it justice, but a very short and simplified description is that it is an automated work flow system for producing podcasts. I've been spending quite a few hours just producing the audio portion of the BSDCan 2007 conference and once you are in the zone, it takes a good 30 minutes to set up and produce one single episode. Lets see... 2 days of 3 rooms with 6 sessions is about 16 hours once everything is in place.Just doing a cost of my time, I could easily justify the limited version on my desktop just for this alone and save time if I do the audio again in 2008.
In other news, I was lurking on the OCLUG IRC and saw reference to the ship that ran aground in Antarctica...
The MS Explorer, an adventure travel ship operated by a Toronto company, was on a 19-day cruise off Antarctica when it hit an iceberg on Nov. 23.
The full article is available online.
I find it amusing that the MS Explorer is listed as threatening penguins (think for a few seconds).
I'm a little slow posting, as I have been too busy to post (read catching up on sleep from 5 days of too little sleep). I attended the inaugural linuxfest last weekend, well, the conference/fest was on Saturday with a early-bird party Friday night. I couldn't make it, as I was visiting with family and had been driving half the day.
I wasn't trying to get to too many things, as my expectation level was not very high, this being a first conference and everybody being new to it. The slow to update website probably had a lot to do with my expectation level. In fact, it went off much better than I expected and I'll be going back next year.
I went to two sessions on Joomla! (one was a community meeting and
the other was a practical hands on install session with basic
configuration). After that I spent some time at the mini trade show (the
BSD folks were there as well) which was pretty good - open source
projects as well as companies such as RedHat and IBM. You can see the
full list at the website. I also
went to an Open Source Advocacy Town Hall type meeting which seemed to
be mostly about how do we get the word out (my opinion would be more
how do we fight the apathy of end users) and had to leave early - the
LPI people were putting on an exam and I was getting my proctor
training.
After that, I went to the closing Keynote by John "Maddog"
Hall. I believe the distilled essence was something like "We make too
much crap that uses too many resources. We need a better way. Let's all
do something about it" I'm probably missing an item or two, as the presentation was about an hour long and had a lot of slides. It was
pretty interesting and I'd like to get my hands on a copy of the
presentation. There was a post conference reception an hour or so
later that I also skipped.
Well, the audio so far was pretty easy. I'm not an audio engineer, nor do I have the patience for it. The audio for the conference was originally recorded as wav files on a cd recorder for each session, so given what t he microphone the speaker is using hears and the gear being used, a trim and some additions are all it gets.
I suspect that the video I shot will prove to be a little more difficult. It's captured on one of those Sony HDD cameras, so the file is a compressed mpeg4 to begin with. The good news is that iLife '08 on my mac sees the video from the camera with no problem. The downside is that the silly camera must use a DOS file system, as the files are all limited to 2GB each, so I may have to do a number of cuts and joins to get it all put together properly. These will also be posted in video podcast format for space reasons.
With some luck, maybe before the end of November.
The next day, same room. This makes two days worth of audio. I have four more to set up.
At long last, I have gotten started on the road to production.
The following files are Day 1, room B1038
[Crossposted to my other blog]
I just got back from attending a friend's wedding back in my hometown. Well, she's more of my wife's friend, but that's not significant enough to matter.
In the interest of saving a few dollars (just over $300) and a few days dog kennel money, I adjusted my stay down a few days and the price dropped dramatically. If I had stayed an additional week, I could have gotten the same deal, but it would have cost me 7 days consulting rates and the extra 7 days kennel fees (as well as taxing my relationship with the person taking care of my cats). I just don't get it - how can it cost $300 more to go out on the same flight on a different day? It's not like I hadn't stayed over a weekend; oh yeah, they don't do that any more. I booked a return trip; right, that doesn't matter anymore either. Well, then there is no real way to predict prices. Fees and taxes are another good one. Better than half the cost of the trip was the various surcharges, taxes, airport fees, security fees, etc. Don't forget, they still offer complimentary drinks (water, juice, soft drinks, milk, coffee, and tea), but don't ask for a refill if they are busy. food is available - you have to purchase it now. Not even the salty fried carbohydrates are available any more. Stock up on bottled water and a visit to the Tim Horton's or Second Cup inside the security area before you board the aircraft. To add insult to injury, the flight had mechanical difficulties and we sat on the tarmac for an extra half hour (the plane was filled to capacity - and smelled like it). I did make my connecting flight in Halifax, but it was getting close - the hour I had between flights had dropped to 10 minutes.
Where was I going? Thats it, vacation... Well, the trip out was Wednesday afternoon, arriving around 21:00, so nothing to do that evening except get settled in, have a meal, unpack and grab some sleep.
Thursday morning - wake up (later than I would have liked, 1.5 hours later in the day). Figure out the sequence of events for the next few days:
- The wedding (Saturday afternoon, evening and night)
- My anniversary (Friday night)
- The combined family get together (Thursday evening - 7 hours from now and running until relatively late)
- Breakfast with my sister and her husband (saturday morning)
- Get a few gifts for my nieces (right after Saturday breakfast)
- My parent's wedding anniversary dinner with my side of the family (Sunday afternoon/evening - they had it a few days early so my wife and I could attend)
- Some time with my nieces - take them out for breakfast and give them a few gifts (Monday morning and early afternoon)
- Fly back to Ottawa (Monday late afternoon, arriving 9:30pm)
If I check that list correctly, I had some time on Friday to check my email, moderate a mailing list (over 300 spam messages), attempt to figure out why my father-in-law's computer was so slow, download my wife's pictures to my laptop so she had empty memory cards again, and realize that the three or four things I actually wanted to do would not happen. My inlaws also do pretty much nothing but cook and entertain these days - there was always a planned (slightly elaborate) meal so no skipping out on that.
I still had a good time. Next visit will be for NO events and just to relax (yeah, right!)
Almost forgot - back to work Tuesday morning, run out and pick up the dog after work (65km away) and get home to call my wife to let her know that the dog is OK, the cats are fine, the house is still standing and everything is as it should be. This is then followed by a run out to a friends house for the weekly visit. Wednesday night, out for wings with a bunch of friends. It's Thursday morning and I finally feel like I'm starting to recover from the "vacation"
On the plus side, I think I have a social life.
Here's a picture from Signal Hill, overlooking the city harbour:
It's been a little hectic around here lately, new organizations to join, conferences to attend, lawns to mow and course material to prepare. That's in addition to my day job. As a result (and due to running out of disc space), it's taken some time to get at the audio from the conference.
This is the first one I have converted - the keynote address. Others will follow this week. I'm also working on the videos, but that takes a lot longer.
This is a mac podcast formatted item, as will the videos that I post later.
The full versions will be too big to place online unless someone with a lot of storage and a large pipe offers hosting.
Once I get them completed, and if Dan agrees, I'll be able to put them on DVD for the bandwidth limited or find that angel bandwidth provider.
BSDcan 2007 has ended. I've managed to attend three of the four, my day job interfered once, but that should no longer happen. This is the first one where I attended the tutorials and I have to say they were informative and useful.
I should clarify that a little. I learned BSD Unix in 1982 on a Vax 11/780 running 4.1 BSD. The machine was upgraded to 4.2 along the way, and that was as far as I got with BSD. Over the intervening years, I've been using AIX, HP-UX, Xenix '286 (long story), SunOS & Solaris, and Linux in most of it's incarnations. My current day job involves Solaris and Linux, so not a lot of BSD exposure. I'm in the process of changing that, but I think it will take a few months.
A short list of the sessions I attended may be good here. Anyone who wishes to get more info on what was offered can visit the official website at BSDcan.org. The tagline for 2007 was "Low cost, high value - something for everyone!"
Day 1 - Two tutorial sessions
- VoIP tutorial
- Network Diagnosis with Netflow
- Bacula
- Packet filtering for fun and profit
- Opening session
- Scan after one year - coverity scan project
- Open source security lessons
- Home security/monitoring with FreeBSD
- The silent network
- The varnish HTTP accelerator
- The FreeBSD security officer function
- OpenCVS/OpenRCS
- One laptop per child project
- PC-BSD: How BSD will dominate the open source desktop
UTORvpn: A Cross-Platform OpenSource SSL VPN Implementation
Closing session
All things said and done, I had a great time and recommend it to anyone who can go. As conferences go, it is very inexpensive and carries a lot of useful information. Two thumbs up, 5 stars, whatever the top rating scheme you use, I consider it to be top rated. I have more details on my main site at ovSAGE.org, but you need to be signed in to see them. They are not yet completed, as I haven't had time to finish my thoughts but I expect to finish up over the next couple of days.
For the interested, I have posted about 125 photos as a separate post. Feel free to search for yourself if you attended. Look carefully, you might even find Waldo.
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