Let me start by saying that I hate Windows. The Microsoft product. I don’t hate Microsoft. I don’t hate Bill Gates, but I hate, hate, hate Windows. This is not a religious thing, either. I have had that operating system break my spirit more times than I care to think about (and I’ve been at it since… Windows 3.0?). Between the blue screens of death, weird distrustful activation schemes, arbitrary proprietary methodologies, and horrible security record, I just can’t stand the operating system itself. And I’m staring at two copies of Vista on my shelf that I can’t use because they suck. That’s about $600 sitting there. Sucking.

Having said that, I also know that I can’t run everything that I’d like to run in Linux. And as much as I love my MacBook, I don’t think I care to buy all my software over again for the Mac, thank you very much.

No, for better or worse, I’m a Linux guy. Note that I am NOT recommending that ANYONE in their right mind switch to Linux for their desktop. I have a propeller on my beanie the size of a helicopter blade. If you’re starting out and can afford it, go Mac. If you can’t afford that, go Windows 7. If you’re a total geek who sits in his (or her) underwear until three in the morning trying to get a cron job to be able to get a custom kernel to build so you can hook up your old radio-controlled light-switch-remote to your machine… Linux is for you. Now, go take a shower and go to bed. (continue reading…)

Granted, I tend to be a little… extreme… in the oddly setup network scenarios. Still, there are times when I need to make my freaky little combination work with a client’s environment without reconfiguring their network to meet my own needs.

I have a client that has a PPTP-based VPN solution in place. While I prefer a more robust SSL or IPSec VPN– this isn’t about me. That’s what they have, and it works for them. I needed to make my tools work with that situation.

On my end, though, I run a Linux desktop with virtualized (ask me later) instances of client servers or development environments. In this case, I had a Windows XP guest system running, but I needed to be able to access my Linux system as well on their network. So, while Linux’s NetworkManager would happily make a connection to their relatively oldish VPN server device, I couldn’t make another from the XP client at the same time.

What’s more, their VPN server device was having no part of routing my network’s traffic. (Note: I am not specifying the parts involved here because I don’t want to start a ‘you should have done THIS!’ discussion. I’m very much a ‘get it working and move on’ person.)

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If you’re like me and have more than one machine to worry about, you’ve no doubt tried to remotely access one from the other.  There are times when you just can keep getting up to go over to the other machine just to enter some command or see how something’s running.  Then there are times when one machine is in a colocation closet in San Francisco, and you’re living in, say, Japan, like I was.  Or maybe your mom can’t get the 12:00 to stop blinking on her VCR (and she still has a VCR), and now she’d like you to figure out why “the Internet is broken.” (continue reading…)

Last time, I wrote about options for backing up MySQL, but I talked about them as though there is one kind of database, the MySQL database.  However, that’s not at all true.  There are two main types of storage engine used in MySQL– MyISAM and InnoDB.  In fact, there are many more, but these are the two most commonly used without special requirements. This is about the point where those of you not interested in the more, well, “technical” aspects of databases might want to go outside for a walk. (continue reading…)