Brain Log
My 2 Cents for the Web
Setting Up a Full-fledged FreeBSD Server – Prelude
May 23rd
Recently, my company started a new project which we have some high hopes for. I’ll write about it later on the blog but for now it’s in the preliminary research phase. Anyway, we needed some services to facilitate our daily routines. The company already had a server running FreeNAS which is a pretty cool FreeBSD variant, focusing on ease of setup and usability. I totally recommend it for places where a certain set of services such as file-sharing and web are needed. In such cases nothing can beat solutions such as FreeNAS and OpenFiler.
But just like any other off-the shelf solution, there are downsides to these. FreeNAS is based on the 6.x branch of FreeBSD so the packages are rather old. Also if you need some particular packages, you may go through some hard time if you’re lucky or may have have to let go of the whole thing if you’re unlucky. We needed something very flexible that could satisfy our needs without sacrificing much.
My natural choice was FreeBSD. It’s been my favorite server OS choice for the last couple of years. I may write about the reasons I like it so much as a sever-side OS later on but here, suffice to say it was our obvious choice. So what’s next? Well, we made a list of the service the server would have to provide. This way, we could have some kind of mind map of what’s going to happen so that we could integrate services which were close in nature as well as taking necessary precautions when configuring services to avoid the need to do it all over again. So here’s our preliminary list:
- A base installation of the latest stable release of FreeBSD
- Software RAID for two 500 GB hard drives which would server as the main storage media
- Internet-sharing
- Access to the LAN resources using some kind of remote access mechanism
- AMP server with all necessary PHP and Apache modules which would serve as testbed to the development team
- A software change management (SCM) solution
- File-sharing server using SMB protocol for sake on interoperability between UNIX, Windows and Mac desktops. I know, it sucks as a file-sharing protocol but that’s the way it is. Deal with it. You’re an admin, not a CEO. Do what you’re told.
- A complete mail server solution satisfying needs such as SMPT, POP3, IMAP and preferably a web client
Cheer up
Apr 4th
I have been a fan of German (Deutsch, as the German themselves say) for such a long time. I really wanted to go for German courses during my Bachelor’s but since Yazd, which is one of the major cities in Iran, absolutely sucked in this kind of stuff it never happened then. I finally started the courses like 3 years ago but had to leave it in the middle of the way because the hours didn’t fit into my schedule.
So now that I have tons of free time I thought it could be just the perfect time to resume what I left off. I signed up for the “Super Intensiv” course, 3 hours a day and it was fabulous. Sometimes the smallest thing can cheer you up. So bottom of the line is, if you’re frustrated, depressed, etc. just do something new. Your old routines get won’t get you anywhere new. Don’t be naive. Act NOW.
Career, choices do matter
Apr 2nd
I’ve been unemployed for the last 5 months for a couple of personal and professional reasons. I won’t pretend that it hasn’t been harsh on me. I’m not the kind of people who can get along with freelance stuff well. But on the bright side, it has given me the opportunity and even made me rethink of my career path so far. I’ve experience three different workplaces in the last two years. I really don’t care what others may think about these figures but between you and me, I think it sucks.
Now that I look at all these two years, I see that I could’ve done much better, if only I had made some better choices about my career. But still who knows how things would’ve turned out if I had made a different choice? That’s the way it is. Long story short, I’ve been thinking about my own career decisions, trying to come up with some kind of charter which helps make me decisions, some rules of thumb and here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
- Your passion is the one thing driving you. If you don’t have passion for something, it probably means you won’t be much of an expert in that field, but just another person who does that job merely for a living.
- Perseverance can make all the difference. Anyone who has worked anywhere know too well that attitude can change everything. Most of the time it probably won’t matter what a seasoned professional you’re. If you can’t fit in, you just don’t belong. Perseverance is one the characters you’re gonna need if you want to end up somewhere worth the time and efforts. Don’t give up just because you had a bad day with your boss or there’s some glitch in this month’s payment. Life can be hard, get used to it. Bottom of the line, DON’T BE A CRY BABY.
- Know your principles. There are essentially two kind of things for any person; the things that can be compromised and the ones that can’t be. Decide what belongs where. It really helps on times such as the one when you’re asked to cancel some family celebration because of some last minute assignment. There are times when you gotta stand your ground, so you’d better know what your priorities are beforehand.
- Improve. The way I’ve seen it, most employers don’t care about your career growth as long as it doesn’t affect the way you do your job and sometimes they may even rather that you have just as much as knowledge as needed for the job. But the question is what is best for you? Don’t let your daily job turn you into no cripple, move on.
Well, that’s all I can think of right now. If you can think of something, share it.
Why Desktop Linux Does, and Probably Will ,Suck?
Mar 26th
I’ve been a loyal Linux desktop user for the past 5 years and it’s been quite an education. I mean most of what I know about Linux is due to the fact that I’ve had to wrestle with it on a daily basis. You may wonder, WTF? Well, here’s the problem. Although Linux is a fabulous desktop and has much to offer, there are times when you just want to kill yourself. How about some examples?
When I started using Linux I worked in a firm. We had to use to a VPN connection, a PPTP connection to be more specific. It took me a week of constant work to make it work. It was partly due to my poor knowledge of the whole thing but gosh, it seems a time-devouring task even now. Thanks to things such as NetworkManager and it’s PPTP wrapper this has been solves but there are always new stuff. I recently had to setup a LT2P tunnel and it was the same story all over again.
Another problem is the instability issue. Recently I had to use Arch Linux for a book I’m writing for rapidbooks. Now Arch is definitely one of my favorite distros, if not the only one. So I expected a smooth installation but hell no. After downloading the KDEmod packages, 450 MB, I realized it didn’t work due to some bug in DBus so I had to download another 450 MB of the vanilla KDE packages to have a fully functional desktop. I don’t think it’s a much different story in other distros. I have used Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE (as well as OpenSuSE), Mandriva and Gentoo as my desktop and each had it’s own flaws to drive me away.
The main reason behind this, IMHO, is the lack of a centralized, capable body to oversee the whole process of release and especially the upstream. Fedora started using KDE 4.0 while the KDE developers had made it abundantly clear that it was not a production release but rather a kind of release candidate and offered no way to use KDE 3 on the release. So if someone wanted to stick to KDE 3 branch, they had to go with the older release. There was the same story with PulseAduion. The first thing I had to do when using Fedora 11 and 12 was replacing pulseaudio with the good old alsa which, JUST WORKS. And for the love of God, who needs a sound server on a Linux desktop? In case you need a streaming server, there is always VLC which also JUST WORKS for this purpose.
A desktop user shouldn’t have to deal with all this stuff. The desktop should JUST WORK. Is that too much asked? That’s the very reason I’ve switched to Mac. Since I’ve got my MacBook, not even once have I had to wrestle with some text file configuration to make something work. I realize there are all these rights of freedom issues with Apple but there are times when you need something to JUST WORK. Don’t you agree?
New Year Resolution
Mar 19th
Once again, it’s the new year and time for the new year resolutions. Have you decided anything yet?