brentashley

I turned off my NT box last night. I’ll still bring it up a couple more times before formatting it for its new life as a friend’s home desktop, but it’s no longer the server I depend on for daily …well …serving.

It was a whirlwind week of learning. I wasn’t starting from nothing – I had dabbled with Linux before a bit – but in order to be confident in replacing my main machine, I had to do a lot of studying. Hard work, but all well worth the investment.

Although the OS cost me nothing but a download and some cd blanks, I did spend over $200 on books, each carefully chosen. Notable ones are:

• Linux System Administration by Marcel Gagne. Highly recommended for someone who’s already quite nerdy and wants to become comfortable with Linux.
• O’Reilly’s Using Samba. Essential for supplying file and print to Windows machines on your network
• O’Reilly’s Apache – the definitive guide.
• Sybex’s Linux Command Instant Reference. Good coverage, arranged by task so you can discover related commands easily

The heaviest bits of learning and planning surrounded security and permissions, especially on exposed services. Not stuff to be taken lightly.

My family website was a treat to convert from ASP to Perl CGI because I had used ASP with PerlScript. Global replace “$Response->Write” with “print”, slap a “use CGI;” at the top, a couple more tweaks, and Brent’s a happy nerdboy.

I replaced my JSRS Select Box demo based on ASP/.MDB with a PHP/MySql version.

Cool tools:

• Webmin – great set of tools. The best part is that you can delegate some limited root-only activity to specific users without giving them the keys to the kingdom
• Mandrake‘s own Software Manager
• Samba and SWAT – although I like messing with the bare conf file
• Midnight Commander – an absolute must if you ever used Norton Commander for DOS. Even if you didn’t!

The swimming’s great. Pull up a partition and I’ll meet you by the pool.