Wish I'd known about that earlier...PLUS: Special update!

Journal Saint Aardvark's Journal: Wish I'd known about that earlier...PLUS: Special update! 2

Journal by Saint Aardvark on Monday January 22, 2007 @08:33PM

First off, a special catch-up entry for my very, very special Slashdot friends. :-) I've been slack at cross-posting entries from my blog since about halfway through LISA. I'm going to do my best to fix that, but I won't be posting old entries here...too much work, and Slashdot has no way of backdating old entries.

I've set up a new blog on my site, using a combination of Perl, ASCIIdoc, Make and email. It's working well, though there are some bugs and missing features. The main things I like about it are that it's plain text and there's no PHP. At last, I can edit things in emacs without using Mozex!

And so, on to today's entry in which I make a fool of myself by denigrating different operating systems based on experiences from three years ago. As always, there are comments both here and on the website...including a FreeBSD committer who cordially invites me to put my money where my mouth is. Fair point, and I'll be responding to that later. (Along with admitting my ignorance about pkg-src on Solaris.)

On with the show!

libpst is a command-line tool that converts Outlook .pst files into standard mbox files, the way T&R intended.Wish I'd known about this before... One of the outstanding feature requests is listing and extracting individual messages. Maybe I'll take a look at this.

In other news, I borked my home machine (Debian testing) by trying to extend a partition w/ReiserFS. That gave me a perfect excuse to upgrade to a bigger disk and reinstall Debian.

Next up is maybe looking at replacing my venerable copy of Slackware 9 with a Debian install, too; the ease of installing and upgrading Debian packages is just too good to pass up.

I did consider other OSs:

FreeBSD: Even after three years, port-upgrade still scares me.
NetBSD: meh, what's exciting about that?
OpenBSD: Secure, yes, and God knows I'd like to use pf. But not easy to upgrade, either ports or releases.
Dragonfly: Not yet.
BSDs in general: I want a journalled FS.
OpenSolaris: If I wanted to upgrade everything by hand, I'd stick with Slackware.

And yes, I realize I'm damned ignorant, and that a server should not be exciting. But I'm convinced that a big part of running a server successfully is ease of upgrading, whether security fixes or new app versions, and Debian is just wonderful.

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