mehack

Synthesis’s network went down last Friday. Not down in the sense of our network connection. Not down in the sense of WiFi. I mean really down. Our main server decided that it was time to call it quit, and left the building. Really out. Like bye bye. Time to rebuild.

Some advice for people who find themselves in a similar predicament:

• Ditch Windows Server if you can. Synthesis used to rely on it for Exchange (to support the Outlook and Windows Mobile junkies in the office), but when the processor melts down on that computer, you can’t just take the hard drives and plug it into another machine;
• minimize the number of your machines in your closet and run Ubuntu JeOS — if you do need to run Windows, at least you get a lot more flexibility;
• Zimbra, zimbra, zimbra! We’re still testing it, but so far we absolutely love it. The web client rocks, it has Windows Mobile push support, and I’m now finally using iCal and Mail.app instead of Outlook under Parallels; and
• for backups, Jungledisk is the way to go. We mount S3 from inside our Linux instances and do daily rsyncs of critical data for backup. And, once week, we automatically suspend each instance, hot copy it, and rsync that for backup.

Better, stronger, faster.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 9:16 am and is tagged under IT, S3, synthesis, VMWare, Zimbra.