A friend has convinced me to build an E-Commerce site with him (he is a good sales person, which was part of the deal!).  Technically this is really not that hard seeing how I have done this before, however the cool thing is that I get to design the system from the ground up.  Which means I get to ‘do it right’ from the get go by making the site secure, scalable and easy to administer.  Two new tools I am using for this project are Puppet and Ruby on Rails.  Combined with KVM for the many servers, I am really enjoying this.  Especially when the person I am working with understands that I will do this as inexpensive as possible and when I mention the need for a VM server, instead of pushing back… conferences calls some one who can help get resources.  Still, it is really fun to be able to get some pretty redundant systems for very little money.  I mean, how beefy does a firewall have to be… all I ask for is a 1U case with hot swap disks, dual power supplies and a LOM

The VM server is a bit more difficult as you have to really look at the processors to ensure KVM is supported.  AMD is pretty straight forward. I wish Intel was the same.  Though with how inexpensive 1TB SATA drives and Linux having software RAID 6, my goal is to keep this server under a grand.  Like I said, I am having fun with this.

On the political side, Portland’s local government is going off the deep end with Hayden Island.  On one side of the island they want to take away land with the CRC.  Then Adams’ ‘Hand Picked Yes People’ spent 17 months and $500,000 doing… well no one knows?  Then it is becoming politically to popular to speak up for sexually exploited teens, which Dan Saltzman started making noise about during his re-election.  My question is where was he and the rest… oh, a year ago?

Speaking about asleep a the wheel.  Portland city council did what we know they would do with lawsuits against the city that they know they can not win… settle.  One would thing that the former and current police commissioners would make it to the council session to vote and give guidance about why it took 4 years and $1.6 million.

One good thing, all of this tech that I am doing is gearing up for some really cool stuff for the local elections in 2012!

Categories: Linux, Portland politics, Puppet, Ruby, city council, geek
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I have been a solid Linux user for more than a decade now… and have never had a virus.  Granted I am a Unix\Linux systems admin and the last (and only) time my system was hacked was by a co-worker who found a bug in the backup software we were using.

Anyhow, Mary has to use Windows (which I understand, though can not wait to get her a Mac).  I really feel bad for Windows users with all the malicious code out there.  For the longest time I have believed that local governments and schools cold save a lot of money in time and licensing by using something like Ubuntu (my Linux flavor of choice, hey- it is a Debian variant).  Why are we giving money to Redmons, WA… when we have OSDL just down the street from us?  No too mention that that money could go to local consultants and stay in our local economy.

But back to Mary’s system.  Wow, this bug on it was straight up nasty.  I had to use my fallback  Linux rescue boot disk, mount her disk and remove files that way.  Now that Spybot Search and Destroy is running, all should be good.

Categories: Linux, Portland politics
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