Catching Up...
27 Mar '06 - 20:50 by benrYa, I've been pretty quiet the last week or two. Sorry about that.
I've been bogged down with work-work stuff. I've been working on deploying the Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Its a AJAX heavy mail stack. The stack itself contains everything you need, built from standard OSS tools like OpenLDAP, Postfix, Tomcat, Perdition (IMAP Proxy), Apache, etc. Zimbra is a good solution for in-house Exchange replacement and its real differentiator is a really slick AJAX web interface. Its a pretty kool product really. The way we're using it is somewhat diffrent, however... we're deploying it to end users to compliment their hosted solutions. We've branded it HMail. Remember all those Galaxy systems I showed pictures of? I mentioned they were all going to be running RHEL against my will... this is what they were bought for. The solution consists of Zimbra on 5 X2100's (LDAP and MTA's) and 3 X4100's ("Mail Box Servers", they store and serve email), running on RHEL 4 (bleh) and utilizing Red Hat Cluster, with storage supplied by a NetApp FAS270 via iSCSI. There were some problems with our plan though... Zimbra works nicely on a single server, or even multiple non-redundant servers, but when you add failover capability into the mix via Red Hat Cluster, which they support, things start getting nasty. If your asking why we don't use Solaris/X86 instead of RHEL, or Veritas Cluster Suite instead of Red Hat Cluster, well, its all about big bucks and vendor support. I've been beating on Zimbra about both issues, but at this point in time my hands are tied. Because this is customer facing I can't just say 'the hell with support' and go it alone. We ran into so many problems and so many sleepless nights that as the "go live" deadline approached we had no choice but to deploy what I could guarrentee would work and just deploy on a single server (X4200). I'm using the FAS270 and an iSCSI LUN to rsync the box nightly to, in the event that something happened to the box (unlikely). The upshot is that the solution is deployed and our customers are really happy. The downside is that I'm still working on getting all the kinks worked out of the clustered rollout so that we can migrate to it in the next 30 days.
So over the last 2 weeks there has been a lot of sleepless nights and long days getting things worked out. Now that we're live, at least it means that I can work on things during business hours and have some sort of life again. This weekend has been spent re-couping. I caught up on some much needed Battlefield 2 game play, spent lots of time with the kids, worked around the house, spent lots of time cuddling with Tamarah, and because long hours like this are as hard if not harder on Tamarah than on me, I sent her off to a Day Spa on Saturday to give her some relaxation and rebuilding time. Between all the events of the last 2 weeks, Glenn (my son, 9mo old) is just starting to come out of his phase of waking up every 2 hours during the night. That makes for sleepless nights even when I'm not working and takes a huge toll on both Tamarah and I. Sleeping with a screaming child isn't a lot of fun, but he is starting to come out of it, which is welcome.
So now I'm starting to work myself out of this giant hole of work I've been neglecting. I've got tons of mail, blog posts, docs, and code to catch up on. If you sent me mail and I haven't gotten back to you yet, please accept my appology and know that I'll get back to you in the next day or two. Genunix needs some work and updates, and that'll happen shortly too.
One upshot for me was Friday afternoon, when people were fried from the long hours getting all the parts of the latest site update ready (Zimbra is only a small part of it) and took off early, which gave me a chance to reload my workstation at the office with Solaris 10 Update 2 Beta and Oracle 10g R2. If only I had Acroread I'd be in heaven.
Lots of stuff to come this week...
I am here to say hello and you have a great site!
Sung (Email) (URL) - 12 June '06 - 13:30
Here you can leave your markbill (Email) (URL) - 12 June '06 - 15:40
I like this site!shelton (Email) (URL) - 13 June '06 - 01:04
Hi there! Your site is cool!karey (Email) (URL) - 13 June '06 - 03:00
This is the coolest La Cocina.