I’m a little slack in my “normal” follow-up to a meeting. We had a presentation from Rove IT on managing systems with a smartphone. All said it was a good presentation and shows a lot of promise for administering a GUI environment.

As for *nix, well, not much beyond what you can do with a standard ssh client. This isn’t a criticism, it’s just the reality of *nix. If you can’t admin from a command line, well you probably shouldn’t be on call with a network enabled smartphone attempting to do something intelligent during a meltdown.

On the other hand, some of the SQL management was quite impressive and the windows service management items seemed to be valuable. Given I spend most of my time in a *nix environment, not having to remember what the commands and options and locations of m$windows items is a good thing. There was a lot of interaction and the talk was quite dynamic. We were all over the map. In general, I’d have to say it’s worth it if you don’t want to be hopping through the hoops to get port forwards running, etc. or if you have a mixed environment and you want a management tool that isn’t just an rdesktop or ssh client. Oh yeah, it also does vnc.

I was also talking about our broken mailing list. Nothing posted in June went out, neither did anything prior to the 19th of July. Apparently when you migrate a mailing list from one system to another, AND you have changed the type of MTA, things are not quite as simple as the basic migration instructions. Specifically, the old system was on Sendmail and the new one was on Postfix. There are a few extras for Postfix. I should do a short bit on that as part of closing off the mail server configuration items for our server tutorial.

Speaking of which, I owe a few slides/notes on getting the last bits completed. As I had to rebuild the web server, I went ahead and changed over to Postfix as an exercise in doing things differently. It’s too bad I didn’t save some screen shots and make a few notes, I could have used that to finish up the configuration. This may take me a few days to get done, but be expecting it before our next meeting.

We are also looking at a August social event on a Friday evening. Tim has offered to host a barbecue some Friday night when he is not on call in the next month or so. The details are not fully formed at present, but stay tuned for the info. Probably on the mailing list.