I’ve also been building a new web server which is now in production. I’ve moved the blogs over to the new server and have gotten most everything working that needed to be completed. I’ve now turned my attention to building a development server. Most of that initial work is done. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have everything from my old development server transferred to the new one. The development server is intended to provide the following functions:

1. Be a development location where I can try out stuff on my blog server and get it tested before transporting the new stuff into the production server. This is more important now that I’m serving up web logs for Jim, Nina, and eventually some other functions. The server pretty much needs to be operational except when I’m making backup copies. Backups are currently a pain as I have to tar up the backup, ftp it to my windows machine, and then make a CD or a DVD of the tarfile. I need to buy a cd recorder to put into the production web server so I can write the backups directly to CD on that server.
2. Domain Name Server. I’ve put up Bind9 as a name server inside the network referring to the CableOne name servers on the outside. That allowed me to retire an old computer from the network entirely that was running djbdns. The fellow running this dns project hasn’t made much of the bind9 capability available in his system and seems to refuse to consider any of it important. There’s been a lot of work done on bind to fix most of the security holes and bind9 is a pretty capable system. So I’ve switched dns server software.
3. dhcp server. The computer that I retired also served up dhcp addresses. That’s been moved to the new development server.
4. Source Code Management. I have been using CVS to manage my source code. A much improved code management system has become available in the meantime called Subversion. I’m now in the process of getting Subversion implemented and configured the way I’d like it to be configured. Along with that will be a web log specifically for what I’m doing with my source code. That weblog will be on this development server, and thus not visible to the outside world. Going along with Subversion will be something like Tortisesvn to connect my development environment on my windows machine to the Subversion server.
5. Samba server. I’ve been running an older version of Samba on the old development server. The new Samba3 has much better capability and is a lot more stable, so the next set of work will be to get Samba configured on the development server and running properly. I put backups of some important files out on the Samba shares as a quick place to store things.
6. e-mail server. I’ve been running qmail as an e-mail server. This is another project with poor documentation. There’s a good book about how to install qmail titled The qmail Handbook but it doesn’t have any info on how to administer qmail once it’s installed, for instance, something as simple as adding a new user. It’s just gotten frustrating enough that I’m going to a standard email server — Postfix. There’s plenty of help available and lots of good documentation around on this program. Further, since I’m running SuSe as the operating system, the standard configuration program YaST has all of the assistance on managing Postfix and administering the mail server. Perhaps once I have postfix running correctly, I can get the problem with the weblog no longer accepting emails fixed.
7. Mailing list manager. I haven’t been running a mailing list server in the past but I think it could be a helpful service. So, that’s something I hope to put in place during the month of January. So, there’s plenty to do on the technical front here in the office.

I need a name for the home office. It needs some kind of a snazzy name such as Roland’s Roost or something like that. Use the comment link to give me some ideas. Happy New Year!