Horses - I've been extremely busy so beyond working at the barn I've not really done a lot with Nippet. It totally sucks. every since I've started working at UVM I've just felt to dead to ride or anything. I've been telling myself to bring my tack home for like the last 2 weeks and every time I forget. I just want to give them a good cleaning, since the last time I really did it was probably a year ago or more, lame.

I noticed his fly sheet that I just bought him already has a rip in it. I also should buy better straps because the one from his winter blanket are just way to elasticky. I also noticed the belly straps come undone about every day.

I've been meaning to order some fly spray for about month now, but that never happened either, god, I am like the worst horse owner ever. I guess I won't really be needing it anymore as the temperatures are pretty much cold again and the flies are gone, I'll have to monitor it though, if they seem bad, I'll definitely pick up a bottle at the very least, the gallon refill can wait till next Spring.

I definitely hope I can get some better time with him Wednesday even though it'll be after a UVM day...it's not like I've got anything else scheduled.

Geek - I had an epically and way to long of a battle with Mac OS X Server and a new client and getting it on as a mobile home directory. What a pain in the ass!! The home directory is still all messed up, the permissions are all screwed up, mostly for the Public and Sites folder which sucks, but whatever. I think eventually at some point, I'll rebuild the server and then go from there. That might be a project for next weekend.

I've been working with morgan to get one of the Cisco switches working. We did manage to update the 2924 with new settings which is awesome, but the 2900XL is still being a pain in the ass...

Other - Work at UVM is going. I definitely do not have the right tools I need to perform my duties completely. It's really lame, there's no software disks, I don't really have my own computer still.

emilie went down to PA this weekend to visit her folks. I stayed here cause I have a buncha stuff to do. Umm, nothing else I really feel like writing about now, so have a good one folks.

Yesterday, I had a day full of consulting and other work. I had a client come over in the AM for a data transfer which went very well, quite easy. I also tended to some of their basic computer questions. Then I ordered a pizza and it was very good. After that I had another consulting appointment and that too was very simple. Small Dog screwed up the clients computer and I just went in and fixed it. I don't know if I would say screwed up, but they didn't change the things they had changed back to what they originally were leaving the client rather confused. Either way, I got them all fixed up and they seemed pleased.

So here's a bit of a rant. Back in the spring the town deemed that one of the bridges leading from our town into the next was not safe anymore and had to replaced. This bridge was pretty important to a lot of people as it meant we didn't have to drive on the interstate but rather on this "back road". I prefer it personally cause I love driving with my windows down, and it's not that great at 7mph when you're on the interstate, anyways, when I was consulting, it was the last road right before the bridge. After my appointment I was planning on going to the barn to get my chores done and whatnot. So instead of simply being able to drive over the bridge and then 10 minutes to the barn, I had to drive all the way back home, get on the interstate, then drive all the way back. It was worst thing ever, complete waste of time. The good news is that a temporary bridge will be completed within the next week or two.

After that whole ordeal, I finally made it to the barn, and got my chores done. When I got home, I hung out for a bit, and then my good friend Clifford (who's been in Afghanistan for the last 4 years and finally got back into the states about 2 months ago) came over with his girlfriend. We ended up going out to grab a bite and then we went to the skatepark in Barre where we proceeded to "skateboard" if that's what you want to call it. I haven't really skated in 4 years or so. We definitely had a good time though.

Today, I worked at UVM, nothing really special came out of it. I am thinking about changing to Mantis from OSTicket, mostly because I know Mantis can be a bit more flexible and has more option...although it might be possible to tweak OSTicket so that it does a better job, who knows....I'll try to figure it out tomorrow. Hopefully I can convince them to purchase both OS X Leopard Server and a PC to drop Linux on to for another server.

My buddy John also came over tonight and we went for a bike ride. He basically just left last summer right after we started hanging out. But apparently it was all for the better. He's living in Manchester, NH, doing IT/software engineer stuff. Had an awesome time with him, caught up, was a lot of fun. He'll be going into a new job in a week or something. He's got an office right above Canonical (the Ubuntu people!) which is awesome.

Well I've got to get some dinner cause I've not really eaten all day, I think we'll watch some Doug or some movie tonight, hope you kids are doing well!

Well starting with Friday, I got a bunch of work done in the AM. I actually had a fair amount, more then I thought I would have. I did a lot of preparation for the server work we did this weekend. Obviously I didn't get everything covered because we did hit a few snags while upgrading the servers. So after I got my work done I got all my gear packed up and headed to where the servers are kept. I worked on more prep work while there and then emilie came. She bought some stuff I forgot which was good.

Around 1pm the guy from GMA came out and checked over our lines and everything. We ended up splitting the voice and data wires and then we ran a cable directly from the data lines and pretty much right into the modem. Definitely noticed a BIG improvement and now I've noticed 0 disconnections since yesterday which is awesome. So now Scribbld should be up and running at 100%!

I don't think anything spectacular happened on Friday night. I attempted to get to bed early so that I could wake up early and start working at 8am like I mentioned.


.... interruption....

I just sent this photo to Keith, he should obviously get this instead of iPhone --


.... ok back to your regularly scheduled program ....

So I woke up a bit later then I had wanted to on Saturday, but by 8:20am we were working on the server. The first snag we hit was that one of the web servers wouldn't connect to the Internet. it's NIC module wasn't be loaded. Fortunately after some poking around and chatting on #Gentoo I got it working and made sure it loaded up on boot too.

The next snag we hit was the server to be Scribbld 1 ran some rather new hardware so it had trouble finding the hard drive. After bother #Debian I remembered the last time we installed Linux on it we had to use this special custom build which included drivers for all this new stuff. So after getting a bootable USB key we got the base system installed.

The last major snag we hit was we forgot to snag the Last.fm code from the development box so that feature was "disabled" until we could get to it today.

morgan and I worked until 10pm or so last night. We pretty much finished up all the big things and had about 8-10 smaller things left to do today. We did 2-3 of them today, the rest we'll complete over the course of the next 2 weeks. I don't expect it to take that long though.

emilie and I went to the barn this afternoon, played with the kitties, Bethany did really well in her A circuit show this past week. We almost brought another kitty home, we'll see. When I got home I added the Last.fm code and made sure it worked and it did. I'm just working on another Gentoo install for a private WoW server. I am hoping I can bring the databases over from the old percheron install, but you never know.

Alright, I think it's time to go relax and no more computer!

First I must apologize for not leaving comments as of late. I've been really busy consulting, working my horse, working at the barn, getting paper work done for my new job at the University and in-between spending some time with emilie. I've also been working hard at making sure we get a much more reliable connection between our ISP and our servers.

A guy from our ISP actually came out today and had a look at it all, I had him drill a direct line from our telephone box right into the server room. So now the modem has a direct connection to the phone box and it should be much better. Things seem to be fixed.

Tomorrow we'll be working on upgrading our entire systems setup. I've started a couple things right now, but the majority of it will get done tomorrow. We'll be starting at 8am and I hope to have everything back up and running by the late afternoon tomorrow if not sooner. It's definitely going to be pretty hectic but we'll get it all done.

I think I'll be getting to bed relatively early tonight, got to be up early tomorrow. I am hoping if it's nice in the evening, I'll be able to go out riding, but who knows. Have a nice weekend everyone, I'll attempt to get some commenting done!

This weekend went by waaaay to fast! On Saturday Emilie and I went riding. Definitely had an awesome time, really got a good ride in. Around 10pm or so the main database server locked up and everything went down. Totally suckass, so I had to drive like 20 minutes to where the servers are located and had to manually reboot it to find out the boot system RAID set had become degraded. No idea how it happened, but the rebuild only took 2 hours which wasn't too bad. The last time that happened to me, it happened on a 500GB set and took like 12 hours to rebuild lol. I do apologize about that! emilie actually came with me to keep me company, we finally got home around 12am haha

Sunday, not much happened, I've been playing as much Star Fox Adventures as I can, pretty fun game. I am ~20% done...worked at the barn and then went to my parents for dinner. Had an awesome dinner...I got a bunch of new movies and some new anime too (picked it up off the server while there).

Today I went back down to Boston with Keith. He had a second interview with Apple, he said it went very well, so that's awesome. We hit up Fire & Ice and the way back. Had some amazing food as usual. I highly recommend anyone who lives in Boston or visiting Boston to go there, you will love it! Really good price too, a lot better then I thought it was going to be.

I snagged an iPhone 3G, and it's quite nice. emilie got my old 8GB iPhone.

Tomorrow I've got consulting down south, so that'll be nice, of course I doubt it'll be nice weather, oh well. I think I might go riding tomorrow too. I got paid from the appointment at Yellow Steel in NH, yay!

I believe that's all the news I've got for right now! :) OH, Emilie and I saw Ex Machina, AWESOME!!!

I've been pretty busy with getting another job, consulting and attempting to upgrade Scribbld's code base. morgan and I have been working for the last 2 days on getting the code up to date. We're running it all on a development server which is really nice. I can get a lot of work done there without having to worry about screwing up the live site, always a plus! Basically the major new feature is the ability to have the Music field on the Update page auto-populate with your latest track on Last.fm (should have an account there). Definitely cool!

Besides updating the development code, we've also turned the chat server back on and now instead of having to type in your username that will automatically work (should you be logged in). Since the Chat link only shows up when you're logged in, it should work 98% of the time. The other 2% is people might have the link bookmarked and so when they hit it and they're NOT logged in, it'll give them a nickname like Anon4829 or something.

I've also emailed my ISP about the recent connection dropping between them and the servers, and other equipment. Hopefully they can help me figure out if it's their end or my end. Hopefully it's theirs haha.

On Wednesday I went riding. It was really nice even though we mostly walked around the ring, we did trot a bit, but I was just so beat after working that I just wanted to take it easy. It was a lot of fun though, sure relieves a lot of stress and gives you some time to clear your head. That's what I enjoy most about horses and riding, it's a good time to just focus on that and nothing else, plus you can talk to your horse about anything and nothing have to worry about it!

As for getting another job, that's pretty much 100% finalized which is great, one less thing to worry about. I'll be working at the University of Vermont as a mini (and by mini, I mean just me) IT department for the Center for Disability or something. It'll be fun. Pay is decent, obviously nothing close to consulting, but it'll do just fine.

Anyways, I hope that either this weekend or next (probably next) we can get the Scribbld live site updated to the new code. I think I am going to give Scribbld the quad-core box and one of the dual-core will be a full time development server. So that's the plan as of right now.

I played some Star Fox Adventures last night, it's getting to be a lot more fun now that I've found a guide on GameFAQs. I just hate messing around in a game, trying to figure out what to do, I just don't have time for that. I gotta get going on Final Fantasy III too.

So that's about it for now, I thought about going riding today and I might, I think I am going to relax my poor head hurts, I've not done this much coding in a long time, not fun, code sucks!! Maybe I'll watch Hancock.

This might be a relatively quick post. I'm pretty busy and I'm trying to spend some time with emilie since I didn't get to really last night.

On Saturday I went up to Milton with David and played some airsoft. It was relatively lame because the area was large and there was maybe 10 people. I guess it was okay, it was something to do at least. On Sunday Emilie and I just hung out, went to the barn and had fun, then went to my parents for dinner which was nice.

Today, I had another appointment in Burlington for something which I shall leave un-named for the moment. It actually went well though. After that I had consulting appointment and that too went really well. I got some really yummy banana bread out of it :)

Last night I pretty much spent like 4 hours getting Unrealircd and Anope working. Obviously morgan helped and we pretty much finished it up. There's a little bit left of configuration to do. We tried to get an Eggdrop bot to work, but we might have to have someone else do that for us, as we're pretty much clueless on how it works. For the moment, I am completely satisfied with how it works. I just wanted a basic chatroom where I have some bit of control. That way if people are being dumb I can just kick or ban them. Definitely join up though, I am thinking about putting a big chat button somewhere haha

Tonight, just relaxing, Emilie is making her amazingly delicious calzones, so I can't wait for that. We're watching Star Wars: Episode I right now, I would love to take a cold shower at some point too.

Anyways, I hope everyone has a lovely day and a lovely week, I do hope I have time to post again shortly :)

Woke up relatively early this morning, got a bunch of work done and some fun things. For some reason the scheme code differed between web server 1 and 3, don't know why, but I fixed it. Also trying to figure out why the site likes to hold up messages (comments, emails, etc...). So what I've done to try to fix that is run a screen on the database server with a process that checks that and sends out the necessary workers to send out messages. Hopefully it works :P

I've also gotten a few comments/emails/support requests about the captchas not working but I cannot replicate the issue. Every time I go to the create a journal page I get a captcha and it seems to work fine. I would just refresh the page if you get a broken image for a captcha.

I've got a consulting appointment setting up Mac OS X Leopard Server this morning. Hopefully it goes relatively quickly. The last appointment I had with them took like 15 minutes haha I know this one will definitely take longer but it should be fun! I'll pretty much be starting from scratch which is nice, but a bit harder. I'll definitely be doing an Advanced Install too.

Last night Emilie and I were going to cook up this fabulous Thai dinner, but we ended up just getting some fried wontons from the Thai place up the street and not cooking up our noodles and stuff, oops...haha

We watched some Ebichu (which emilie thought was hilarious) and just relaxing for the evening. I did read some more Anime Insider, I think I am still like 2 months worth of issues behind haha

I've been really dying to play airsoft, but there's nothing going on here or in MA lately. Fortunately there's a game up here this weekend, I'm trying to get Greg to come up and play.

This weekend was decent. I saw Batman: The Dark Night with Keith on Friday night. Absolutely fantastic, I think I would gladly pay another $9.00 to see it again. There were several parts where I thought it was the end of the movie but it wasn't and it just kept getting better and better. It was really well done, and yes, Heath Ledger was outstanding. He really played the part and he played it pretty damn well in my opinion. I definitely enjoyed that movie.

On Saturday, Emilie and I hung out. I had built a new R.O.S.E Online server for us so we spent some time playing with it. We actually had stayed up till around 1am on Friday playing. We're pretty much back to where we were when I had a server going the last time. I am definitely kicking myself for not remembering to backup the SQL database though, but it's fun. I did hit a pretty big bug since my client was more up to date then the database and CSV files though. Eventually I found a proper fix and it all seems to work well now. I'm already level 23 and I've got into the soldier class. emilie chose to be a muse. We're having fun with it.

On Sunday, it pretty much rained all day, so we played some more R.O.S.E. Then we went to see the horses and I worked there and got my stalls cleaned. Then we went over to my parents for dinner which was great, also had some AMAZING pie for dessert. We actually got to take home the leftovers (of which I had some of today). I picked up my Lego sets that had been sitting there and when Emilie and I got home from my parents I worked on rebuilding them. I was missing quite a few guys though and a few pieces. Not a big deal though, I'm actually surprised I had as much as I did.

Today was Buddy's vet appointment so that was fun (not for him, me). He got jabbed with like 4-5 needles lol. I definitely enjoy watching them do it and all, and I try to ask questions and stuff...they're REALLY WONDERFUL. I love my vets. They're super nice and helpful to me. I also got my stalls done while I was there.

I was hoping that I could have stopped by to drop of the Wacraft maps and DBC files but they weren't done extracting from the client by the time I had to leave. So now I've got to upload like 3GBs of data to a server...getting close though. Probably won't be done until tonight though. At least now I've found this really nice application which downloads the source code for the server, it grabs the database, and then it compiles the code and pretty much does everything, I love automation!

This afternoon, I got some consulting calls done, I re-scheduled my consulting appointment for tomorrow to Wednesday. Keith and I are going to Boston tomorrow for his interview at the Apple store, although that might be a sucky drive for him if he gets it. Then we're going to bum around Boston, hit up Fire & Ice which will be awesome, maybe hit up Newbury Comics and maybe Chinatown, who knows. It's definitely going to be awesome.

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. This week is going to be pretty busy for me!!

Here's some pictures of my new character in the server.






Emilie and I

Had my consulting appointment this morning, went quite quickly. I would say 15 minutes max. I'll probably get paid more in travel then for the actual work haha

I basically removed a DNS server from the router, then changed the DNS configuration on the server so that machines used the server as it's primary DNS and then anything else will be forwarded to OpenDNS. I highly suggest everyone check out OpenDNS too :)

Then I went to Small Dog, some lady thought I worked there and proceeded to ask me about the Drobo and online backup to which I gladly helped her out with. I picked up some gear for Canus for Thursday's appointment and then I went to Radio Shack. Some nice guy helped me get the right on/off switch and some electrical tape.

Got home, got the switch working and all, but it's just not going to work that well, the fan really is too big, same with the switch and for some reason the battery gets really hot, so I am going to look at my finances and I'll probably get this slick looking G&G MP5 or something...

Anyways, emilie got a new job, so we're getting Thai food to celebrate...probably watch a movie or something tonight. Have a good one kids!

Well, it sure has been a crazy couple of days. On Wednesday, emilie had to go in for some emergency surgery. Fortunately it went well and everything is okay. I ended up going to the hospital around 9:30pm that night. When I got there she was in the OR so I pretty much waited around for a couple hours. I did get to read some of my Game Informer magazine from....last year...haha I am SOOOO behind on my magazines. I have a couple Macworlds from 2005 lol. Finally, they got her situated in a nice room and I spent the night. Around 10pm or so, Scribbld crapped out. Rather someone unplugged the power strip the modem sits on so access to everything died. But it was about 3am and I was to tired to log into the Tumblr site and post an update so I am sorry about that!

I pretty much got no sleep cause I was sleeping in this chair and it just wasn't the greatest. On Thursday we hung out and waited for the doctors and stuff and finally got the leave around 1-2pm. We pretty much just came home. Went for a little walk so she could pick up some pain drugs, she also got a nice little puzzle (alright 750 little itty bitty pieces) and then just relaxed. I believe I took a nap, AND then around 6pm, I finally got someone to turn the power strip back on. So yeah, sorry!!

I've been making a lot of critters in Spore, I also made this little YouTube clone site so I could upload my own videos. Check it out! What a pain in the butt to get working. After making symbolic links to the video encoder applications in Linux, I found the settings panel where I could have simply have changed the paths lol Oh well, it works pretty well and I am pretty happy with the software. I just need to make a new for it and a new logo... I also uploaded some images. I am definitely quite happy with the Creature Creator, for $10, you definitely cannot go wrong! I do kind of wish there was more parts, I know there's a lot, but I want more!!

Today Emilie and I went to breakfast at this wonderful little, er maybe big diner right by the hospital. Then after that I dropped her off to get her car. She had to run into work quickly to setup her schedule for next week. Probably half-days. I'm just doing some emails, forums, Scribbld stuff now...I think I may go watch some TV or something, I've got a consulting call to do.

I hope everyone has a lovely day and a lovely weekend. I'll be down in Massachusetts at two OPs, one at Ghost Town and one HUGE (400+ people), Tears of the Sun at TOLCOM. Hopefully I don't get shot too many times!

On Saturday night I believe it was I got my hands on the trial edition of the Spore Creature Creator. Unfortunately, I did get to play it until last night. emilie & I have been making tons of these little critters!



Hopefully sometime today we'll be getting the full demo version, I know I pre-ordered it last night. I'll probably buy a couple copies (for $10, why not!). That means we'll get access to even more body parts and stuff. It's definitely going to be awesome. I even made that ClipShare site (which is where the above video comes from) so I could upload my own videos and stuff. What a pain in the butt, but I finally got it working :) I know Spore integrates with YouTube, but I hate relying on other people/services haha

So besides playing Spore yesterday, I worked at the barn. I brought the baby kitties a new box. I used the big one from my State Line order. It was actually not as big as I thought it was, after seeing the kitties inside of it. It worked out really well. They're starting to become a lot more lively, and are looking to play a lot. After the barn, I got some food shopping done. Got these awesome chips, can't remember what they're called.

Before heading to the barn and all though, I spent the morning, installing Mac OS X Leopard Server on my Xserve. The poor PowerBook had had enough of being the server I think. The little laptop can't handle such tasks haha So I migrated all my iTunes stuff over and got it working with the AppleTV. Works pretty well now, although the server sucks up a lot more energy and all. I also got my PC up and running so I could play the Spore trial later that night.

We got Chinese food last night, quite delicious. Then we spent like hours and hours playing with the Spore Creature Creator. I was up until like 2am working on that video site and playing Spore. Unfortunately I got up around 7am today, which sucks, but oh well, I'll probably take a nap this afternoon or something. I've got a consulting appointment around 10am today, should be pretty simple, but who knows. I've got to install Mac OS X Leopard Server on a PowerMac G5 and then migrate some data over. Hopefully they'll be using OpenDNS so I won't have to worry about setting up a proxy server of some type.

So hopefully sometime today the full version of the Creature Creator comes out. I pre-ordered it last night. If not, well I've still got lots of ideas to mess around with and we've got a bunch of new movies to watch. I got every Dirty Jobs episode, so we'll have fun watching those.

Have a lovely Tuesday everyone!

When I looked yesterday evening this morning to see where my order from State Line was it was down in CT, but just today, when I got home from lunch it was sitting there in-front of the door! The muck bucket isn't as big as I thought it was but, it'll be nicer then that broken bucket at the barn. I wanted to take some photos and post it, but the flash on my Canon is dead...even after ripping it apart it still won't work (note to anyone who rips apart their digital camera, make sure you know what you're doing because it can be dangerous)! I think the flash bulb is busted so I'll probably end up getting a new camera. I was looking at the Canon SD1000 or 750, both would work fine for me at the moment. I saw a commercial for the Canon XSi, whoa. I want it.

So yesterday, I spent most of it working on a silly/fun/lame/cool site, mostly going to be used for development on Scribbld but under a different name - DramaJournal.net haha so go play around with it. It's probably pretty buggy and full of issues, but that's what a dev server is supposed to be like.

Today, I worked on adding some of the features from DJ to Scribbld. I did get the navigation bar here...and I managed to get some more moodthemes installed. I changed mine to the whitekaos haha AND I changed my layout. I like it! I just need to change the links and add some text blurbs.

I think I might head to the barn now, seeing as the weather isn't so hot and I've got all these fun things!

Have a lovely day everyone!

Well today was quite good, minus the server troubles we've been having. This morning I went out to the barn, got my chores done and then I got to play! I groomed my Nippets, and shaved his little man beard...haha or just the whiskers, cause he doesn't really have a beard lol. The razor is fucking ridiculously sharp, you can pretty much just barely touch it to a hair and the hair gets cut. It's insane...but it does a really great job. So after getting him all cleaned up and pretty we did some ground work which went really well. I can pretty much take him off the lead rope and he'll follow me around, stop when I ask him to stop, turn when and where I want him too. It's like having a big dog haha After ground work, we tacked up and rode around for a bit, which he did very well with and me too, I'm proud of both of us and I hope we'll become awesome this summer. So this is the start, we'll see!

After that I gave him one of the new treats emilie picked up for the boys. I actually gave Nippet one and Buddy one, they absolutely love those treats. I have a feeling we might be able to make them, it looks like it's just grain, molasses and some other things...

Poor Emilie got sick at work today, so I've kind of been taking care of her, she came home early and she pretty much slept all day, still sleeping now...I am not sure if I should move her from the floor to the bed...

I've pretty much got Mint installed everywhere I want it, unfortunately I've not been able to get through a full day in the past 3 days without something crappy it out, which means the statistics aren't 100% right now. I'm definitely quite pleased with the software as it gives me the data I want without the bloat of Google Analytics (although I still like Google's stuff!).

Hrmm, not sure if I've got anything else to say. I'm compressing some mail server backups right now, oh fun fun fun!! Then I think I am off to bed. Good night everyone!

This past weekend, I got to try out some of the new features that come in Mac OS X Leopard Server. First lets back up a bit to Tiger Server.

OS X Tiger Server is the first piece of server software I've used from Apple. I come from the world of Linux where most of the configuration is done by hand, you have to edit your own application configuration files. There's no pretty GUI or buttons to click on. Tiger Server saved a lot of time because all I had to do was type a few things in, click 'Go' and I could have a very resourceful server. In just a matter of minutes, I could be running a web server, file server, DNS server, VPN server and more! Apple really made Tiger Server easy to setup and manage. Thy provided some really great tools too.

With Leopard Server they've made it even EASIER to setup and manage. I think Apple has really extended the potential of Leopard server, they making is so Leopard Server has a place in the home as well as large companies. They continue to provide some really awesome tools to manage it and it includes loads of new and cool features.

When I setup Leopard Server, I did a fresh install (no upgrade) so I am not sure if some of the things I am talking about will apply to people who choose to upgrade from Leopard Server.

Upon boot up after you install Leopard server you can choose what type of server you want. There are three options, Standard, Workgroup or Advanced. Each of the three types just had a bit different configuration in which services it uses and sets up for you. While I think this is great for people who like things done for them, I prefer to configure each service by hand (I guess that's the Linux-side of me coming out). People who really just want the easiest way to manage their server should probably choose either the Standard or Workgroup configurations. This will also allow you to use some of the new and nifty tools that Apple has included with Leopard Server. Unfortunately when you use the Advanced server type you loose the ability to use some of those tools (you can still use Server Admin, Workgroup Manager and command line utilities though). I am torn between letting Apple do all of the hard stuff so I can use the new tools (using the Workgroup server type) or just using the Advanced server type and handling everything myself. I'm still deciding but I have to say I think it's great Apple is making their server software usable by most anyone with some experience in computer and networking.

So after choosing the type of server you want, Apple will go about and work its magic, setting up the services and configuring them for you.

For my tests I choose the Workgroup type, so I got the iCal service, web server, iChat service, Mail service, Time Machine backup service, the Open Directory service and a few others. I have a feeling most people will choose the Workgroup type, because it includes a lot of services while still being able to easily manage it.

One of the new management applications that comes with Leopard Server is called Server Preferences. It looks very similar to System Preferences, but it allows you to easily manage the services on your server. Over the last 2-3 years I've gotten very used to using Server Admin and Workgroup Manager to manage all my services and users, so if I choose to use the Workgroup server type on my live server, I'll have to get use to doing everything through the Server Preferences application. It's definitely a great tool for people who are new too OS X Server.

A few of the things that I am really looking forward to actually using is the wiki server, the iCal server and possibly the Time Machine service.

I run a couple wikis (think of Wikipedia.org but on a much smaller scale) so I would love to move them into this service. I have a few shared calendars that need to actually be editable by more then just one person, so the iCal server will surely help with that problem.

The last thing, Time Machine backup service sounds really interesting but at this point I don't know enough about how it works to rely on that as my only backup service. It sounds really great that client machines can backup to the server rather then a local disk. It saves me from having to buy multiple external drives for each client, instead I can just point them to the server and use that as my backup location. I guess I'll just have to do some testing!

In the few days I spent playing with Leopard server, I have to say that I am really impressed with how easy Apple has made it for someone to setup and manage a fully featured server. They include some great tools and some really new and much welcomed features.

Here's a few PDF files that I found quite useful when setting up Leopard Server, check them out cause they're very useful.

Getting Started with OS X Leopard Server
Installation Setup & Worksheet