The World Blows Up: Banking Madness
The world economy has gone mad – the UK government buys major stakes in HBOS and RBS!
Company Hires 101st person
Just a quick post to say that the company has now hired their 100 and 101st employee! Its almost 4 years to the day that we started too.
How a year in China changes everything
So this time last year I was planning on building a distributed IT system across many small offices with a maximum of 30 people in each. This year we are consolidated in one building on two different floors with all the servers in one room. Amazing change.
But to be honest it does not really change the overall IT plan that much. Our customers are still spread out all over the world and we now have staff members on three continents – not bad for a 100 person company.
The one thing that has changed is what software we use – we are driving firmly away from Microsoft and into the hands of Linux and open source software.
We are working with an Apache project ERP system called OFBiz with help from the great guys at Hotwax Media – the improvements we have seen from in our warehouse are just amazing.
How to handle user authentication has also become clearer with the help of a Redhat project called FreeIPA. This really looks good enough to replace our current Active Directory setup.
Finally Rackspace, my personal favourite managed hosting company went public and is about to open its Hong Kong data center. Servers already ordered!
Mac SVN Clients
I started to look round for SVN clients to update our internal repos – windows and linux ones are easy, Mac however is bit harder.
So far the testing includes:
Going to use them for a while and see which one pans out.
Distributed IT Network Backups?
I am currently building the foundation of my companies new IT network, its looking very open source heavy, very cisco based and also very distributed. Think five sites and only little old me to do most of the “heavy lifting”.
I have a great second but sometimes we need time off – thats fine and good but what happens to our backups? Well at the moment there really is only one server of any importance that we need to backup & so I gave this job (mainly becuase the server is in his office) to my assistant. Well what happens when he goes on holiday and the worst of the worst comes I cant get to the site to change tapes?
Well becuase its a one tape backup – the backup just keeps on writing to the same tape – backuped ok, good course not!
We use Rackspace for our customer facing servers & so I keep tabs on them. Their CTO of webmail.us recently blogged that they use Amazon’s EC2 for backup & it got me thinking. Thats quite a nice solution for me too – all the backups of various things in all the various offices can all just backup straight to EC2.
Um.. going to chew on that for a while
Best Mac tool ever!
Seriously – I have been getting really really REALLY annoyed with the lack of support for Alt-Tab Windows style, so after a few googles i found:
This thing is going to save my Mac! I was thinking of switching to Ubuntu…
Keeping your RHEL5 Xen Guest systems up2date
If you are wondering how you update your guest RHEL5 systems see this KB from RedHat
Getting Redhat Virtualization Up and Running
So today I started the companies migration to Linux – Redhat EL 5 Linux to be exact from our entirely Microsoft based systems into a 99% Linux run IT system.
Heres the plan:
- Servers all Redhat
- Desktops 99% Ubuntu – Accounting needs Windows for internet banking
- All networking Cisco
Why RHEL5 – well because it offers commercial support of virtualization and great support of HP server hardware out the box. Basically it just needs to work & work properly. I feel that I can get the best of all these with Redhat.
For the desktops Ubuntu simply because its a quick install, minimal software in-fact its almost perfect for a company desktop PC.
So where to start – well first I need to setup one of the Redhat servers with virtualization.
After reading the Fedora wiki and then the first thing to do is copy the install media to the hard drive and share via NFS – I dont like NFS so install I opt for the HTTP installed option and copy everything (excluding CD6) on to my MacBook Pro and setup a web server.
After everything is copied over then time to run the install wizard
on the RedHat machine run the command
virt-install
This starts a very simple and easy to follow wizard that will baby you through the whole installation process.
Reading:
ChannelAdvisor buy Marketworks
I have been using ChannelAdvisor for nearly two years now & when I was chosing which auction management system to use I knew about Marketworks but they were not in the same league – it was more aimed at lower volume sellers and how the dizzy heights I could see the company I am working for reaching.
Anyway ChannelAdvisor bought Marketworks – see their press release here
I had always assumed that there were more customers than that to make such a high GMV figure!