Technologists Notes

In spite of lamenting the seeming likelihood that Fedora 9 would not handle simple routing well enough for production deployment in a VMware Server (1.0.5) environment, I now have Fedora 9 deployed in such a production environment, without major problems.

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I just read another blog post bemoaning Vista, with a commenter saying they would never use Vista. If you haven’t read posts and stories like that, you probably don’t need to read this perspective.

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I diverted time away from working with Windows Server 2008 to check out the latest edition of Fedora, released last week. I routinely check out new editions of Fedora when released and put them into production soon afterward. Preliminary reports, e.g., Fedora 9 – an OS that even the Linux challenged can love, made this edition sound at least as promising as usual. Fedora 9 is promising. But it seems doubtful that Linux newbies will find Fedora 9 lovable.  If Fedora 9 is comparable to sliced bread, the slices are uneven.

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Microsoft supported Windows NT4 Server from release to manufacturing in 1996 to the last fixes in 2004. Astonishing numbers of servers reportedly still run NT4 Server, including two that I manage: one is a file/print/directory server and the other is a hot spare for the first one. Both are behind a firewall, and neither is used for email or browsing or other applications likely to be vulnerable to Internet compromise. They’re mostly trouble free. So if it ain’t broke, why fix??

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Week before last I was given a 2002 vintage 700 MHz G4 iMac, one of the ones with the LCD on an arm above a half sphere dome (“pedestal”) system unit. It has 640M of RAM, so I expect it will be useful running (Panther or) Tiger. The hardware doesn’t meet the specs for “Leopard”. Besides, I don’t own a copy of Leopard (10.5), but do own copies of Jaguar/Panther/Tiger (OS X 10.2/3/4, respectively).

The iMac came with Jaguar on it. It had been unused for a while and no one knew the passwords. So it was time to learn about the esoteric Apple boot options and keyboard commands.

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