I am probably outing myself on a number of levels here but hey, what can you do. I hope that this information is of help to someone, somewhere or that at least it will make an interesting read for 5 minutes. Anyway, here goes...

In my 'real' life I am a geek. Well, I work in an industry that is seen to be the domain of Geeks. You know I'm talking about I.T. don't you? Well I am probably the least Geeky guy in my line of work and when you get into it (IT that is), Most of us are not really that way at all. However it works to our advantage to be seen that way sometimes and we let it be. I digress. I have been working in IT for 20 years or so and have migrated from the guy who turns up at your office to fix a flaky printer or monitor or whatever, through the landscapes of small to medium business as the 'server guy' you call when the database goes 'wacky' (to use the technical term) all the way to the enterprise end where I now spend all my time provisioning storage off SAN's and managing a fleet of 400 Virtual Servers on a Hypervisor farm. Double dutch to some, understandable to others, 'putting a shiver up the spine' of a few that know where I'm coming from. Anyway. I have been around IT for a long time and have seen a lot come and go. In my 'other' life that has been woven through this 'real' life, the world of bikes and trips and camping and isolated drama, meditative solitude and all that goes with it, I have lived a similar life. Have only owned one car that I bought because I finally broke my body so bad that I could not ride and did not have enough 'leave' to sit it out. If there are only two thing in this world I know my way around it's bikes and computers. This business gives me the ability to combine them both.....in a funny sort of way.

Enough of that, back to the point. This web site and the other associated systems all sit in my lounge room, next to my stereo, beside my TV. It comes to you via a plain old consumer grade ADSL link in rural QLD, so via an enormously fast 1Mb/s uplink that probably gets a bit tiresome for the occasional visitor but seem to do OK when I access it from outside

Since this is my first post I will give a basic overview of the setup and later, when I have time I will drill down in a bit more detail on each of the components. As far as physical 'bits' go the system is:

• Commodity ADSL Modem/10/100 switch
• Junky beige box with an AMD dual core CPU, 8Gb RAM and some ordinary SAS storage.
• External USB Hard Drive for backup that I manually swap every day or so for the 'offsite' unit that lives in my shed with the bikes

When it comes to Software...Applications and Operating systems etc, it's a pretty eclectic collection. In essence the OS platforms are linux. I have used virtualisation technology because I have that experience and the benefit for me is twofold. Firstly it isolates the 'servers' from the hardware so if for example my cpu/mainboard etc dies, I can replace it and have things up again without making any changes to my OS's at all. Secondly, my lounge room is not too big and I have a limited number of power/network outlets, virtualisation lets me use one power outlet and one network outlet for everything. So as it is today:

• 1 Beige box with an AMD dual core 3GHZ cpu and 8Gb RAM
• 1 VMWare Server (open source/free platform) built on SLES 10.3
• 3 SLES 10.3 servers, 1 Web, 1 Collaboration, 1 Backup/Utility
• 1 WIN XP box that runs OziExplorer Moving Map Software
• 1 Ubuntu 10.4 box to use as an admin box that I can access from my Notebook at home or via a VPN from elsewhere.

The web site that you are browsing now is a Joomla 1.5.x implementation and my messaging collaboration system is Zimbra OSE . I find that both these systems are excellent products that work as designed (most of the time) and have a wealth of devoted developers and information available on the forums and the 'net in general is sufficient to help get whatever you want done (if it can be) and fix any problem you may have. As a seasoned IT guy I am a firm believer in the "if it's not broke don't fix it" mantra AND unless you have a really good reason, stay 1 major release behind the latest. The reason for that is you will have a better chance in:

a) Finding out what a problem is

and

b) Finding a 'good' solution

because there has simply been more people doing what your doing and hence to have the same problem and more time for the developers to come up with a fix for the bug or a correction to the implementation rules if you are behind the bleeding edge!

Well thats a pretty go overview for the time being. I'll be back later for a 'deeper dive' into the how its plumbed together part later.

see ya.