OK so I have a few seconds to breathe. I finished my last CCNA 2nd semester exam on Tuesday and aced it, which cheered me up as I hadn’t really prepared as well as I should have done.

Since my CCNA is over until September, LUG Radio is on a break for the summer and the extraordinary month or so of late nights spent emailing people to organise LUG Radio Live is over, I’ve decided to spend my newly found few spare hours swotting up on new stuff that has been bugging me to investigate it for the last year or two, that’s stuff like Kerberos, LDAP, Xen, SELinux and giving Fedora a good shot at my desktop amongst other things. Who knows, I might even get around to doing some more work testing Jokosher, finish setting up my home studio, setting up an Asterisk box and finally learn Python.

Red Hat and Fedora are really rocking in some cool ways at the moment, they have nailed down things which I’m still waiting to see as part of the distribution on Ubuntu like Xen, SELinux and so on. I think the RH/F way on the server is a lot more straight forward too. It was discussed on a LUG Radio episode (one I wasn’t on I think, like that narrows it down…), whether distros offer all of their work to the wider community or whether they keep stuff in house. For the life of me, I could never understand why other distros didn’t use the Mandrake installer back in the day when installers were all text mode only and I still can’t understand why a lot of distros haven’t borrowed Red Hat’s setup tool, y’know, the setup command, not the installer. It makes life so much easier to configure which services run at boot than reading the man page for update-rc.d every time. Ok so maybe it’s easier when you do it on a daily basis, but I shouldn’t have to carry around in my head how to do that when I can run setup and tick boxes. All of the split config for Exim and Apache pisses me off too, it doesn’t need to be that hard. Oh yeah and the last Ubuntu servers I used fell over almost daily, so I replaced them. No more stability problems 🙂

So yeah I installed Fedora 7 on a spare machine and set about configuring Kerberos and some other stuff, I’m kinda stuck now though cos my designated client machines (a couple of flaky cast-off machines) are being flaky and keep croaking during the install. I put this down to bad hardware than a bad installer, but it’s irritating. I’ll complain about this in another post.

So, yeah, having freed up some time, I’ve suitably filled it again but at least it feels like I’m doing something I think is valuable and rewarding. I get bored if I don’t have something to work on or something to learn.

See you in the Experts Lounge.