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Storage Reliability on Budget Linux Boxes: Lessons from 2000s Operations
2011-11-08
If there is one topic that separates “it works in the lab” from “it survives in production,” it is storage reliability.
In the 2000s, many of us ran important services on hardware that was affordable, not luxurious. IDE disks, then SATA, mixed controller quality, inconsistent cooling, tight budgets, and growth curves that never respected procurement cycles. The internet was becoming mandatory for daily work, but infrastructure budgets often still assumed occasional downtime was acceptable. ... continue
From Mailboxes to Everything Internet, Part 4: Perimeter, Proxies, and the Operations Upgrade
2010-05-21
The final phase of the migration story starts when internet access stops being “useful” and becomes “required for normal business.”
That is the moment architecture changes character. You are no longer adding online capabilities to an offline-first world. You are operating an internet-dependent environment where outages hurt immediately, security posture matters daily, and latency becomes political. ... continue
Early VMware Betas on a Pentium II: When Windows NT Ran Inside SuSE
2009-04-03
Some technical memories do not fade because they were elegant. They stay because they felt impossible at the time.
For me, one of those moments happened on a trusty Intel Pentium II at 350 MHz: early VMware beta builds on SuSE Linux, with Windows NT running inside a window. Today this sounds normal enough that younger admins shrug. Back then it felt like seeing tomorrow leak through a crack in the wall. ... continue
From Mailboxes to Everything Internet, Part 3: Identity, File Services, and Mixed Networks
2008-09-18
By the time mail became stable, the next migration pressure arrived exactly where everyone knew it would: file shares, printers, and user identity.
In theory this is straightforward. In reality, this is where organizations discover the true complexity of their own history. Shared drives are business process. Printer queues are department politics. User accounts are unwritten social contracts. You are not migrating servers. You are migrating habits. ... continue
From Mailboxes to Everything Internet, Part 2: Mail Migration Under Real Traffic
2007-02-27
If Part 1 was about building a bridge, Part 2 is about learning to drive trucks across it in bad weather.
Once mail leaves “small local utility” territory and becomes a central service, the conversation changes. You stop asking “can it send and receive?” and start asking: ... continue