Busy week

I took off Monday after Judith took Alexandra to the E.R. early that morning. Alexandra appears to have a case of bronchitis but it's much better now, since she went on Zithromax. This is the first time in two years she's had to go on any meds.

Yesterday and today I was over in Mt. Laurel, NJ, attending training on BelAir's wireless mesh networking equipment. This is some really neat gear, using a combination of 802.11a for backhaul, plus 802.11b/g for client access. The units can have multiple SSIDs, which in turn can be matched to different VLANs. I'll be back in the office tomorrow.

I've also been doing some experimenting with FreeBSD 6 and Qmail, setting up a "Mail Toaster" inside a VMWare virtual machine. This is for my private client with the SUSE/CommuniGate Pro mail server. I've been looking into replacing this combination since upgrading and maintaining it has become a royal pain in the ass. E.g., updating ClamAV's engine has become impractical due to dependency hell. Also, it's running SUSE 9, for which support is being dropped next month.

While FreeBSD of course rocks, and the Mail Toaster is rather neat, I don't think it's the right replacement for this client. If it was an entirely new setup I might go with it, but from what I've seen, migrating their existing hardware is going to take too long, due to the necessity of downloading and compiling from source the toaster bits.

What I may do is upgrade the box in steps. First, get them on OpenSUSE 10, then look at moving from CommuniGate Pro to Postfix + Qpopper (since they insist on using POP3 instead of IMAP.) We'll see.